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The Social Problems Series

EDITED BY

OLIPHANT SMEATON, M.A., F.S.A.

SOCIALISM

r

The Social Problems Series

SOCIALISM

BY

J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P,

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK

1 6 HENRIETTA STREET, W.C.

AND EDINBURGH

1907

CONTENTS

CHAP.

PAGE

I. The Man and the System

1

Socialism and Social Change .

1

The Human Sacrifice ....

5

The Human Struggle ....

8

Modern Conditions ....

11

The Bargain between Labour and Capital

13

II. The Socialist Movement

17

Industrial Evolution ....

17

France ......

19

Saint-Simon (1760-1825)

21

Fourier (1772-1837)

24

Louis Blanc (1811-1882) .

26

Proudhon (1809-1865) . . . .

29

Great Britain ......

31

Godwin (1756-1836)

32

^ 7^F'!i>LaiL Charles Hall (1745 ?-1825 0
^HmM)' -^ William Thompson (1783 ?-1833)
Ai^WMy p,.i^tr. Patrick Colquhoun (1745-1820) .

33

34

35

Thomas Hodgskin (1795- ? ) •

35

Eobert Owen (1771-1858)

36

' Liberalism ......

38

Socialism ......

41

Lassalle (1825-1864) . . . . .

42

Marx (1818-1883) . . . . .

43

1 Great Britain — Recent Developments

47

VI

CONTENTS

III. The Industrial Argument

Production and Distribution .
The Organisation of Production
The Organisation of Distribution
Labour and Industrial Organisation
Socialism and Production

IV. Some Objections to Socialism
Socialism and Liberty .
Socialism and the Family
Socialism and Keligion
Socialism and Property

V. The Political Future of Socialism
Industrial Reconstruction
Socialism and State Income .
Socialism and Reform .
Socialism in Politics .

PAGE

54
55
60
64
68
74

85
86
94
99
103

108
109
113
117
120

Appendix —

The Progress of Socialism

126

SOCIALISM

CHAPTEE I

THE MAN AND THE SYSTEM

To the ordinary man, not of the street but of the
suburb, Socialism covers a multitude of sins. He
does not understand what Socialism means — and
probably does not want to understand. It occupies
in the vocabulary of his intelligence a place with
those abracadabra and mystic pass words which,
when uttered, raise the seven devils. It is nothing
but waste of time to explain new ideas to such people.
They are the despair of everyone who tries to bring
commonsense into politics, and the victims of those
who appeal to popular ignorance and fear.

Socialism and Social Change

But there are others to whom our existing social
relationships are an unhappy puzzle, who are not

2 SOCIALISM

convinced that the distribution of riches in the
State is fair, or that either wealth or poverty is any
indication of merit or demerit. Moreover, from the
distressing nature of our social problems, these
people take an intellectual interest in the present
as the transition from the past to the future. At
no given moment is society to them a rigid organ-
isation. It came from one form : it is passing to
another form. This is particularly so in industrial
organisation. Within the memory of a still virile
man, the Limited Liability Company has arisen ;
within the memory of most, the Trust has been
born ; and the fundamental and revolutionary change
which these events imply in the relations between
employer and employed, of capital and labour, in
the way in which capital is to be used, and in the
considerations which act as restraints upon the too
excessive subordination of the human creature to the
invested capital, has been seen in its beginnings by
this generation. As the organisation of capital has
proceeded in an increasingly large scale, and as the
relationship between employer and employed has
become, in consequence, more impersonal, more
economic and less human, the State, as such, has
passed a series of laws asserting its right to protect
the weak and to adjust the admitted inequality
established by modern capitalism between employers
and employed.

THE MAN AND THE SYSTEM 3

Minds aware of this constant readjustment of
industrial functions and of the growing invasion of
the modern workshop by law, regard with im-
patience and contempt the attempts made to present
Socialism as the gospel of the envious, the wastrel,
the scoundrel. The Socialist doctrine systematises
these industrial changes. It lays down a law of
capitalist evolution. It describes the natural history
of society. It is not, therefore, only a popular creed
for the market-place but a scientific inquiry for the
study. Like every theory in Sociology it has a
political bearing, but it can be studied as much
detached from politics as is Darwinism.

Socialism is a theory of social organisation,
which reconciles the individual to society. It has
discovered how the individual in society can attain
to a state of complete development. For the
foundation of such a theory one of three assump-
tions must be made. We may assume that a moral
relationship can be established between individuals,
as the Comtists and some of the anarchists do, and
that this will counterbalance the advantages which
a superior economic position gives to some men to
exploit others unjustly. This, however, gives no
guarantee of stability. The son is not as the father
was. Or we may assume, as the Individualists do,
that economic advantages always tend to pass out
of unworthy hands — a pleasure-loving son dissipates

4 SOCIALISM

the fortune inherited from a hard-working father —
so that, on the whole, a state of unregulated com-
petition for economic power allows the maximum
expression of individual liberty. This is the present
system. Or we may assume that economic sove-
reignty cannot be safely given to individuals but
should belong to society organised, so that by a
system of co-operative industrial effort the individual
may be freed from the possibility of economic
slavery, and may share in the benefits which increas-
ing economic advantage brings.

This last is the Socialist view. We have to
experiment with intricate relationships between
capital, land, and labour ; between the interests
of those who possess and of those who can only use
by permission ; between those who live by work day
by day and those who live from incomes drawn
from profits ; and the end at which we aim is such
a relationship between the industrial community of
men and the tools and the raw material which they
use as will completely subordinate production to
human well-being. The existence of the slum and
the waste field side by side ; of the unemployed
bootmaker without a decent pair of shoes on his feet
and yet unable to translate his natural need for shoes
into an economic demand for his own labour as a
shoemaker ; of dilapidated rural houses and an
intense depression in the building trade ; prove as

THE MAN AND THE SYSTEM 5

conclusively, it seems to me, that our industrial
mechanism is out of gear, as a full cistern but a dry-
tap proves that there is an obstruction somewhere
in the pipe. How to make natural need — the
shoeless carpenter — the occasion of work for the
furnitureless shoemaker — is the problem which
Socialists believe they can solve, and the system by
which they would solve it is Socialism.

The Human Sacrifice

Most people are unwilling to admit that the
grand effect of modern industry has been to sub-
ordinate moral and human riches to material gains ;
but it is true nevertheless.

In a senseless and mechanical way, we reel off
our tongues truisms about the responsibilities of
property. We mean nothing by these truisms, and
they only darken our vision. It is not the responsi-
bility of property which we need to emphasise, but
the subordination of property to human ends.
To-day we have people driven off the land. We
regret it, but the land being private property we do
not see our way to stop the sacrifice of State and
human interests incurred by the use to which private
owners put land. We have periods of overwork
alternating with periods of unemployment, but in-
dustrial capital being held by private individuals
*' who are not in business for philanthropic reasons,"

6 SOCIALISM

we regret the circumstances but do not see how we
can alter them. We have low paid women's labour
being substituted for more highly paid men's labour,
and children's labour taking the place of women's ;
we have heads of families no longer able to secure
wages high enough to be a family income ; we have
children offered the inducement of comparatively
high wages for temporary unskilled work which is
to doom them to be casuals for ever on the industrial
market — we admit with much regret the evil, but
commerce must be carried on, competition is severe,
and, though we do not like to say so to the world,
we whisper up our sleeves that men must be
sacrificed to trade. No employer employs a man
because he happens to have married a wife and is
anxious to do his duty as a husband by her, because
he is a citizen and wants the leisure necessary to
prepare himself to exercise the franchise intel-
ligently, because he has a soul and needs relief from
the worry of bread-and-butter problems in order to
prepare himself for heaven. A man is employed
because his employer can make a paying percentage
on his labour. There are a few exceptions, but that
is the rule of commercialism, and the poor employer
who breaks the rule breaks himself

There is a mechanism of commerce. It has no
soul and no sentiment. It is economic only. It is
built up upon the exchange of commodities. It

THE MAN AND THE SYSTEM 7

relates to demand and supply on markets. Theo-
retically our economists tell us — and tell us truly —
the shoemaker makes shoes in order that he may
exchange them for a table which the carpenter is
making, and for coal which the miner is blasting.
But this exchange is carried on by a system of
transfers, at every point of which there is a group
of personal controlling interests which play their
part in exchange only if they can make profit, and
the exchange between the original producers is only
effected if the whole system is in working order,
e.g., makes profit at every point. The simplicity
of exchange does not exist. Human interests are
subject to the necessities of the commercialist
system.

Living as we do in the midst of this system,
moving and having our being in it, it is difficult to
think of any other order. So unfamiliar to us is
anything new that we are completely tripped up by
considerations of how wages could be paid, foremen
appointed, and roads scraped under any other social
organisation but that of which we are now part. It
is almost impossible for us to settle down to the
thought that society grows, that the relations of its
functions change, that age slips into age not by
mechanical but by organic methods, that we make
beginnings here and there, that small experiments
proclaim great principles, and that limited experiences

8 SOCIALISM

show the way to epochal changes. Such a frame of
mind comes only after much thought. Meanwhile
we are unshakeable in our belief that however little
we may like it, humanity must be subordinated to
our system of profit -making.

The Human Struggle

No must was ever more rickety than this.
Matter, property, economic systems have always
been trying to dominate men, and men have always
resisted. They have never fully succeeded in their
resistance, but the fact that they have continued to
carry it on, points to some state of society awaiting
us in which man will dominate economic systems
and other purely material things.

Hitherto social history has been the record of
conditions under which the individual has been
subordinated to social needs. The race and the
community have been preserved, the individual has
been sacrificed. Intensely dramatic as has been
the struggle between individuals for existence, even
more dramatic has been that between the community
and the individual for a common life. Feudalism
subordinated the villein to the social conditions
necessary for the continued existence of a political
community in the Middle Age ; in times earlier than
those a more absolute subordination — amounting to
slavery — was the common condition of. the ordinary

THE MAN AND THE SYSTEM 9

man, because the storm and stress then suffered by
his community necessitated absolute subjection and
unquestionable obedience. If in still earlier times,
as tradition has it, a golden age of liberty existed,
the necessities of social evolution destroyed it. It
disappeared in a " dark unfathomable sea of cloud "
— to emerge some day.

But in the times when obedience was most
necessary the / am I of the human intelligence was
an unwilling bondsman. The slaves and the villeins
revolted ; the labourers haggled over their hire.
Moreover, if individuality in some of its aspects
which we profess to cherish to-day was held upon
a low valuation, certain primitive personal rights
were generally recognised. Women and slaves, the
beasts of burden occupying the lowest status in
most primitive states, were as a rule protected by
some more or less elementary code of custom or law ;
and the poor were saved from the direst consequences
of poverty.

Our Bible makes us familiar with a method of
protecting the poor from the exactions of those in
a more advantageous economic position, which was
a consciously definite acknowledgment that without
such protection the possession of economic power
would lead to enslavement. The Jubilee of the
Israelites was instituted for the purpose of pre-
venting the few in straitened circumstances from

10 SOCIALISM

being alienated for ever from the land, the source
of their life, even when they had been compelled
to part with it temporarily ; and other laws and
customs kept the usurer in his place, secured
some measure of equity for the labourer, regulated
the transfer of house property ; and, generally,
the people were exhorted and compelled to show
by their social actions that they remembered the
days when they were bondsmen in Egypt, " to the
end that there be no poor amongst you."^ The
days came when Israel forgot the bondage of
Egypt, when house was added to house and field
to field ; but when the prophets rose to their
grandest heights of vision or sunk to their lowest
regions of despair, the Messianic days when a king
was to rule righteously and when the widow and
the orphan would be no more oppressed, made
their joy thrill with lyrical welcomes and their
lamentations moan with the sorrow of the sinful,
exiled far from the land of righteous dealings and
human relationships.

In the history of every community some such
attempts as we see in the history of Israel have
been made to protect the individual against the
anti-social use of property held by a class.

What is the position of the individual under
modern commercialism ?

^ Deut. XV. 4.

THE MAN AND THE SYSTEM 11

Modern Conditions

A man is not now dragged into a market to be
bought and sold, he walks into the market and
sells himself. He cannot live without labour, and
the earth being private property and production
of commodities being carried on under a system
which can be worked only by the employment
of much capital, he has no free access to the raw
materials provided by nature upon which he has
to expend his labour, and he cannot enter the
ordinary produce markets because they are organised
in such a way as to shut out the individual. The
necessity is, therefore, imposed upon him of selling
his power and ability as a worker to someone who
is in a position to use it. He enters into a con-
tract for service. The contract may range from a
day to a period of years, but whilst he is working
under it, he is as much bound to his employer as
the peasant was who had to give labour to his
overlord.

I am not urging the essential likeness in this
respect between the workman of the twentieth
century and the peasant of the twelfth in order to
depreciate the position of the former. I am doing
so only because I want to point out the absurdity
of claiming, as some people do, that the wage-earner,
as such, is now free. Society has become more

12 SOCIALISM

fluid in its class relationships, and that is an enor-
mous gain to the individual, but the condition of
the landless and the property less man to-day is
still one which compels him to sell himself to
another in order that he may command the physical
necessities of life. A man will always have to do
service in order to be able to command these
necessities, and such service Socialists demand.
But that which has to be given to-day is given
under certain circumstances which make it im-
possible for Socialists to regard it as the final
economic relationship between a man and his
society.

What are these circumstances ?

1. Service to-day carries with it an inadequate
payment. John Stuart Mill pointed out that in
his time reward was great as labour was little, and
that reward was little as labour was arduous.
Nothing more strikingly shows with how little
critical intelligence we approach the common ex-
periences of life than the assumption nearly always
made that if we put an end to property-owning no
one would be found to work. No one seeks to
destroy property, but if he did he would use the
existing state of things as an argument in his
favour. Poverty rather than property is the re-
ward of labour to-day. The great mass of the
workers own no property — even their most successful

THE MAN AND THE SYSTEM 13

attempts to accumulate, such as Trade Union benefit
funds and Co-operative Society deposits, are in-
significant when divided out per head amongst
those entitled to have them.

2. The bargain between labour and capital stops
at a point which shows that it is a contract which
uses the needs of the one to add to the profits of
the other. One of the claims which the modern
individualist makes with most assurance is that
when a man leaves a factory he is free — when
he has completed his toil under his contract, he
is free. That is true only to a limited extent, as
we shall see ; but in so far as it is true it is only
partly a gain. It means that the person or the
class who has been benefiting by the labour of
the other person or class, has managed to throw
ofi" many of its ancient obligations to the labourers.
It has no responsibilities for them so soon as they
cease to make profits. It can in busy and profitable
years accumulate vast possessions off" their labours ;
so soon as trade slackens it brings its contracts to
an end, and its workers have no claims for further
consideration. The labourer is no longer a charge
upon property in seasons of scarcity. The possessor
gets his labour without incurring any responsibility
beyond that of paying the wages stipulated in the
bond. The free labourer is thus much more a means
of serving other people's ends than he was when he

14 SOCIALISM

was a bondsman. The movements now on foot to
make the rich districts aid the poorer ones in matters
of rating, to establish Old Age Pensions from the
National Income, to ease the pressure of unemploy-
ment upon the industrial classes, are all attempts
to get the community to assume responsibilities
which are complementary to the labour contracts
of our modern '' free " society ; and the demand
that these obligations should be met by taxes upon
property can be defended ultimately only upon the
ground that we are exacting from the class which
benefits from the contracts the obligations which it
eludes in '' free " society, but which it had to bear
in more primitive times and under conditions of
chattel slavery.

3. The contracts nominally economic and
industrial only, influence thought and conduct.
The slave was not allowed to act contrary to the
interests of his master ; the free workman who is
a heretic in respect to any accepted thought or
action is victimised. Putting the most sympathetic
explanation upon this, the employer can plead that
the opinions and actions of the men are elements
in their industrial value to him. This in some
cases is perfectly true, but it only proves that
the conditions which imposed limits on the action
of bondsmen still exist. The Trade Unionist,
the anti-vaccinator, the chapel-goer, the Eadical, the

THE MAN AND THE SYSTEM 15

Socialist are marked for destruction ; free thought
and free expression of opinion are suppressed.

4. The contracts tend more and more to absorb
the whole active life of the labourers; that active
life tends to become concentrated within the years
of youth; a ripening skill tends to become of less
value, and industrial old age comes sooner and is
more and more a state of chronic unemployment.
The English peasant was free from this ; slavery
was very often free from it. The speeding up of
machinery and the increase in the rapidity of work
compel the labourer to give more and more of him-
self in the service for which he receives wages ;
the liberties which he theoretically enjoys when he
is not in the factory or at the bench, become, in
consequence, of diminishing value and reality ; the
absence of the slave's claim upon his master for
shelter becomes a greater and more pressing
grievance. His life is spent in servitude.

And in this stunning whirl the capitalist is equally
involved. He, too, is the slave of his system, as the
steady increase of insanity and minor nervous dis-
orders shows.

Against such servitude man is still in revolt.
These are not the conditions of liberty. Service
will always be required, but its reward should be
full and adequate, and not merely temporary and
inadequate. The man who labours to maintain

16 SOCIALISM

his community will continue to ask as wages an
adequate share in the life and property of his com-
munity. Possession in men was bound to decay,
and equally so will possession in the fruits of other
men's labour disappear. The one was an early
chapter in the history of slavery, the other is a late
chapter in the same story.

The following reasons may be assigned as the
cause of the modern Socialist movement. The
existence of poverty, unemployment, slums ; an
inability to see why the rich are rich particularly
when they are idle ; the glaring effects of landlord-
ism ; the anti-social results of capitalism at its worst,
e.g., sweating, Penrhynism, etc. ; the systematisation
of certain modern tendencies like municipalisation,
industrial laws, etc. ; the consciousness of Trade
Unionism that it cannot advance the interest of
the worker much farther upon present lines ; the
tendency to relate morals to conditions of life ;
the reaction against Manchesterism and the worship
of the vulgar and uncultivated wealthy ; the in-
creased interest taken in historical and sociological
science, and the neo-Darwinism which emphasises
mutual aid as well as competition as a factor in human
progress ; the rationality of the Socialist proposals ;
the effect of the evolution of industrial organisation
upon the human intelligence ; the lack of philosophical
principle in the aims of other political parties.

CHAPTER II

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT

Industrial Evolution

The Socialist traces in the history of labour a steady
consistent impulse. Primitive organisation was
personal and local. Its economics were those of a
people who consumed their own products. But as
the bounds of the family and the tribe widened,
as means of communication were established and
exchange of commodities created a system of
commerce, two things happened. The community
became subdivided into workers and merchants or
traders, and the class of workers was subdivided
into specialised trades. At first this industrial
organisation was subordinated to military necessities.
The workman was to all intents and purposes the
property of his military superior. This, in the
abstract, was the spirit of the Middle Age — particu-
larly of the early Middle Age. But the industrial
organisation and needs of the community asserted
themselves. They grew lustily, obedient to the

18 SOCIALISM

laws of their own being. They came into conflict
with the military organisation. They imposed a
new necessity upon the State. The social organisa-
tion of Feudalism ceased to be able to express the
life of the community. Trade routes were estab-
lished. South and west the sea rovers went. The
Indies were found out ; America was discovered.

Here was a new world. Every sea and shore
cried out to the West to come and exploit it.
Pirates became national heroes. The individual
rose up in his rank primitive majesty and literally
became a law unto himself. The rules of guilds and
the restrictions of ancient municipalities then also
ceased to fit the new developments of trade and
became hampering restrictions which the newer
formed centres of industry would not countenance.
The life of the new era refused to obey the rule of
the old, and men began to believe that anarchy was
the law of nature.

The end of the Middle Age came with the rise of
capitalist industry, the industrial predominance of
the towns, and the beginning of the factory system.
It went down into the past in the midst of a bright
glare of democratic hope. There was heresy in
the Church ; there were visions of a new earth in
the minds of men ; there was revolution in the
State. The new age was to be one of rare triumph
for the common people. True, a new and threaten-

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 19

ing kind of poverty was spreading like a foul canker
throughout Europe. The ancient aristocracy were
becoming commercially minded, agriculture was
beginning to be carried on on business principles,
commons were enclosed, the ancient peasant rights
to the use of the soil were being denied, the heroes
of the wars were tramping on every road and
begging in every shire. These, however, were but
incentives to the democratic evangelists. Utopias,
theocracies, democracies were dreamt of, and the
French and American Revolutions appeared as
angels in the air summoning the chosen ones of the
people to smite the Canaanite and enter into posses-
sion of his lands. In these times, the roots of the
modern Socialist movement are embedded.

It sprung into being almost simultaneously in
England and France, and was an oflshoot of the
Radical movements which passed over these countries
in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

France

In the bosom of France lay the terrible diseases
from which sprung the French Revolution, and which
worked themselves out on the Place de la Concorde.
But until the wars of the Empire had ended, France
had no time to consider what had really been the
effect of her Revolution. Personal liberty had been
greatly amplified, but the economic positions of

20 SOCIALISM

authority from which the aristocracy and the clergy
had been evicted had fallen into the hands of the
middle classes. By the beginning of the nineteenth
century factory industry on a modern scale had
fairly begun in France, and the town workmen
suffering from the immigration from the country
and from those economic tendencies, which were
then almost unbridled, to reduce wages to a bare
subsistence level, commenced to think politically in
terms of class conflict. Eousseau, Mirabeau, Con-
dorcet, Mably had taught the people to hold
property, as it was then known, in light esteem.
" I know of only three ways to exist in society,"
said Mirabeau in 1789; "one can be a beggar, a
thief, a worker. . . . The property owners are but
the agents, the economists of the body social." " To
each his field" was a shibboleth of the Jacobins.
The economic conditions of France gave rise on one
hand to the physiocratic school of economists — the
school which gave the world the watchword of un-
scientific individualism, Laissez /aire, laissez ^passer ;
and, on the other hand, it gave birth to a Socialist
school of thinkers who laid down some of the
most important foundation-stones of the Socialist
fabric of thought. Commercialist individualism and
Socialist proletarianism sprang into existence simul-
taneously.

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 21

Saint-Simon (1760-1825)

The sociological and economic speculations blended
with a generous humanitarianism, which marked the
intellectual revival of France after the exhaustion
of the Napoleonic wars had worn off, focused them-
selves first of all in Claude-Henri de Rouvroy,
Count de Saint-Simon, a scion of a noble house
devoted to absolute government, a volunteer with
La Fayette to the War of American Independence,
a rare soul who, largely under the influence of that
queer customer, Benjamin Franklin, came to under-
stand that civil life and the workman were quite as
honourable as the military calling and the soldier.
Made a prisoner by the British, he was sent to
Jamaica, where he spent his time speculating upon
such questions as how to make a canal through
Central America. Natural Science was still in its
infancy. Imagination and enthusiasm were its
companions, and a fellowship of worthy but
pottering investigators and speculators were
sponsors to the infant. Saint-Simon was one of
these. Endowed with extraordinary prophetic
foresight in some respects, and in others devoid of
practical capacity, Saint-Simon passed from abstract
Natural Science, and, in 1817, appeared his first
volume on social matters entitled VIndustrie, its
sub-title being — Political, Moral, and Philo-

22 SOCIALISM

sophical Discussions in the Interest of all Free Men,
and of useful and independent Worh, He died on
the 19th May 1825.

His system at its best and fullest development
is moral, or, to use a more recently adopted phrase,
it is " economic chivalry." " Men ought to conduct
themselves as brothers one to another." He trans-
lates the formula of Benthamism into terms of his
own creed thus : '* Men ought to place before
themselves as the purpose of their work and actions,
the most prompt and complete possible amelioration
of the moral and physical existence of the most
numerous class." The Ee volution has come far
short of doing this. The middle class has reaped
all its benefits. This class has been content to
establish the English Parliamentary system in order
to exploit twenty-four twenty-fifths of the nation.
The industrial nation should be organised so as to
secure for each member the maximum of comfort
and well-being. In working out his scheme of re-
organisation, he seeks to base it on the intellectual
and moral elements in the State. His system does
not rest upon its own foundation ; his machine does
not work by its own mechanism. A good will and
a pure motive in certain classes are essential to the
success of Saint-Simonism. A council of scientists,
thinkers, artists, industrials is to be the active
functioning authority in Saint-Simon's Utopia, and

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 23

later on when the moral and philanthropic emotions
of Saint-Simon take a more definite place in his
intellectual scheme, his council undergoes a corre-
sponding modification, and, at the same time, he
somewhat surprisingly increases his trust in the
State as the condition of industrial liberty, and
restates his belief that the right to individual
property is a matter of utility.

Saint-Simon was, therefore, not so much a Socialist
as an originator of Socialist thought. He suggested
systematic thinking rather than presented it himself.
He held up an ideal of society which men approved ;
he proposed to create it by ways which men rejected,
but in rejecting them they built up Socialism.
Above all he taught men that the control of a system
of property-owning was more vital to a people than
the control of a legislative machine.

Saint- Simon's disciples carried on his work after
his death, systematised his opinions and imparted
propagandist force to them. Chief among these as
Socialist pioneer was Bazard, the severe practical
logician, who thought his way from the Is to the Is-
to-be, unified and completed his master's creed, and
took his stand upon political revolutionary Saint-
Simonism, rather than upon the Saint-Simonism of
vague moral phrasing and ecclesiastical tone. The
law of association is developed by Bazard, and
becomes a definite creed in the philosophy of history.

24 SOCIALISM

As slave, as serf, as proletariat, the worker has been
exploited. Every stage is an advance upon the
preceding one, and now comes the next stage when
by association the workers are to exploit the globe.
At present, under pressure of the necessity to do
something in order to live, the workman has to
submit to be exploited by employers, and the land-
lords exact rent to which they are not entitled. The
social system by which that is done is perpetuated
by the laws of inheritance. That all the instru-
ments of production should be held by industrial
associations of workers is the only remedy for this
state of things, and Saint-Simonism thus drifts into
Economic Socialism.

Fourier (1772-1837)

Charles Fourier, born in 1772, is another type
of those times when science awoke men's curiosity,
and enticed them to the fantastic. Fourier was
destined by his parents to be a draper, but was
devoted to musical harmony and mathematics of an
occult kind. At an- early age he was punished for
telling the truth when a falsehood would have been
commercially profitable, and a further experience
in business led him to the belief that commercial art
consisted in buying sixpence worth for threepence
and in selling threepence worth for sixpence. A
quaint, gentle, simple-minded character, he hoped to

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 25

cure all social evils by giving free play to the human
passions. He was, therefore, essentially a Utopist
and social architect. The phalanstery which he
built up in his imagination as the perfect community,
with its three square leagues of land, its three
hundred families, its ingenious rules of economic
housekeeping, its repulsive innovations, could not
succeed in practice. But it was an attempt to show
how co-operation and association in industry could
succeed in abolishing poverty without the coercion
of a central State, and without the collective
property in the means of production which the
Saint-Simonians had come to regard as essential.
Fourierism was, indeed, anarchism in one aspect,
individualistic co-operation, as developed by Godin,
in another aspect, and municipal Socialism in yet
another aspect. His system was one of co-operation
in production and in the arrangements of life, but
with individual rights always in the background to
fall back upon should the community — the phalange
— prove tyrannical or otherwise obnoxious.

Fourier^s essential anarchism balanced the State
authority of the Saint - Simon school, and his
mechanical arrangements were at the opposite ex-
treme from Saint-Simon's ecclesiastical moralities.
Although Fourier's first published work appeared in
1805, his system received little notice until after the
school of Saint-Simon had passed under a cloud.

26 SOCIALISM

Louis ^Zanc (1811-1882)

The Industrial Revolution proceeded apace in
France, and the propertyless worker became a larger
and larger class separated from the propertied land
and capital owner by a widening gulf. Saint-
Simonism and Fourierism were mainly intellectual
in their appeals. They did not at first reach the
working classes. But the democratic movement was
at hand. France, after the regime of autocracy
which followed the wars of the Empire, was governed
from 1830 by a Liberal monarch. Free discussion
was allowed. Political economy was moulded in
scientific moulds. Reason knocked at the closed doors
of religious tradition. Beranger, Victor Hugo, Balzac,
George Sand brought romance into touch with the
life of the common people. Cabet reverted to the
ancient methods of building Utopias from dream
stuff". Responsive to this outburst of life, Buchez
tried to found a progressive Catholicism ; Villeneuve-
Bargemont and others advocated various modes of
association based upon doctrines akin to Christian
Socialism ; but, above all, Louis Blanc established a
connection between these social theories of equality
and political action.

If anyone is entitled to be called the Father of
modern Socialist methods, Louis Blanc has claims
almost as good as any rival. He drew men's atten-

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 27

tion away from revolution : he felt that the Liberal
epoch had made revolution unnecessary and there-
fore misleading. His two chief ideas were that
under the stage of individualism, labour was dis-
organised ; that there was unemployment and over-
production ; and that the State should bring cosmos
out of this chaos. In a sentence, his Socialism was
a system under which the " Eight to Work" could
be recognised. He saw that fundamental social
change was to be brought about by reform — not
reform of the Liberal kind, but reform which meant
the systematic approach by stages, each one of which
led up to the next, to some well-defined end.
Capital and the large workshop were accepted by
him as necessary, but he argued that the State, and
not a private individual, should be the capitalist —
*'the banker of the poor." He therefore devised
his scheme of ''social workshops" which were to be
subsidised by the State and were gradually to take
the place of individually owned workshops which
competed with each other. He also claimed that his
schemes could be worked more economically in every
way than those of private capitalists, and that, there-
fore, they w^ould become general by reason of their
own merit.

When he became a member of the Provisional
Government in 1848, he had an opportunity of
subsidising some social workshops. Although in

28 SOCIALISM

time — one lasted for about thirty years — they were
all closed, their large measure of success and their
capacity to struggle against most adverse circum-
stances showed the practicability of the scheme.
Unfortunately these experiments are almost for-
gotten, and people remember only the Paris National
Workshops, which in no way tested Louis Blanc's
proposals, and which were opposed by him as being
started on wrong lines/

Louis Blanc had the misfortune to arouse the
enmity of the communist revolutionaries and the
dogmatic school of collectivists, the revolutionary
political impossibilists, who have added heroic
chapters to the sad history of the collectivist move-
ment, but who have done little to " make their
dreams come true." Whilst lacking in force of will
and definiteness of purpose, he could not face the
attacks made upon him and use the splendid political
opportunities which he had more than once. Driven
into exile during reaction, blamed for not siding
with the revolution of the 31st October, and
again for taking no part in the rising of the 18th
March, and sinking finally into impotence in the

^ " It is perfectly clear that the national workshops were simply a
travesty of the proposals of Louis Blanc established expressly to dis-
credit them. . . . The history of the whole matter fully justifies the
exclamation of Lassalle that * lying is a European power.' It has
been the subject of endless misrepresentation by writers who have
taken no pains to verify the facts." — Kirkup's History of Socialism, 3rd
ed., pp. 49-50.

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 29

National Assembly, he is held up as being a mere
reformist politician. His opponents — some of them
moved merely by personal dislike — who ought to
have been his friends, drove him from the Left
towards the Eight in politics, and the Socialist
movement continued to be an agitation rather than
a transforming fermentation. Louis Blanc never
entered into his inheritance.

Proudhon (1809-1865)

Finally, so far as this stage of the movement
goes, came Proudhon, a kind of French Cobbett, an
educated workman, a genius enlightened by flashes
of wisdom which in their detached gleams were
illuminating but intermittent. His political creed is
a distrust of the State. The individual alone is
sovereign ; his realm is himself only. But Proudhon
is best known as the author of the economic dictum,
" Property is robbery," by which he means that
property which is accumulated by rents and profits,
never having been worked for, ought not to be held.
The exploitation of labour under existing economic
circumstances is the central problem which he desires
to solve. He rejects communism ^ on the ground that
it is a system for the exploitation of the strong by

^ Communism at that time was the name under which Socialism
under its more modern form passed : e.g.^ The Communist Manifesto —
Socialism being then applied to the disorganised socialistic Utopian
proposals like Saint- Simonism.

30 SOCIALISM

the weak ; he concludes that " possession " must
remain, but that it should be recognised only as the
reward for labour. The only organisation which, in
his opinion, can secure this, is one of free associations
of workpeople holding industrial capital, land, and
the means of production. The doctrines of Proudhon,
enunciated with such violence, amount, when pushed
to their conclusion, to nothing more than autonomous
self-help workshops and peasant proprietorship,
operating to maintain equality by nothing more
reliable than a spirit of mutualism.

These pioneers of the Socialist movement, in spite
of their diverging opinions on many points, occupied
to a great extent precisely the same ground. They
agreed that individualism had broken down, that it
had resulted in industrial chaos, that property was
used for the exploitation of labour, that wage
labourer was a phase of slavery not of liberty. They
further agreed that the association of labour was the
way to end the chaos, and that this association in
some way or other should be the owner of the means
of production. They hoped, as a whole, for the
quickening of the spirit of morality, which would
sharpen the desire of the people for equality and the
sentiment of solidarity and fraternity. Living at a
time when the political organisation of Europe had
not been settled, political change through Parlia-
mentary methods did not figure very prominently in

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 31

their proposals. The democratic State was only-
being formed, and they could not be expected to see
that it was an essential part of their Socialist system.
When they were not practically absolutists, like
the Saint-Simonians, they were generally to be
found in the camp of the Revolutionists. At this
point, the dominating dogmas of Marxism appeared,
and the International movement was established.

Great Britain

Whilst this first phase of the Socialist movement
was being worked out in France, in Great Britain a
movement on somewhat similar lines was evolving.

The Socialist movement in England ^ has a history
quite as distinguished as it has in France. Robert
Owen is generally regarded as its founder ; but
before Owen's time there was a considerable economic
literature showing the groping of men's minds
towards a Socialist system of production and exchange.
In the seventeenth century, before the science of
economics was divorced from the practice of politics,
as it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth,^ attempts

^ This period of English Socialism is dealt with fully in Menger's
Rigid to the Whole Produce of Labour, and particularly in the Introduc-
tion by Professor Foxwell to the English edition.

2 The fact that the Free Trade doctrine was an application of the
economic needs of manufacturers, certainly does not contradict this
statement. The economic needs of a class influencing politics is
totally different from a scientific economic relationship with politics,
which was what seventeenth-century economic writers tried to maintain.

32 SOCIALISM

were made, as in Harrington's Oceana^ to establish
an essential relationship between wealth and power,
and in consequence to plan a state on the firm
economic basis of an equitable distribution of property.
In England, political unrest and economic specula-
tion about the ownership of wealth and its effect
upon the community, went hand in hand.

Godwin (1756-1836)

Godwin published his humane thoughts and
opinions after the fury of the Revolution had spent
itself, and when reaction shadowed every respectable
household in the land. He followed the light of
pure reason. What men can dream, men can do.
"Our only true felicity consists in the expansion of
our intellectual powers, the knowledge of truth and
the practice of virtue." But barring our way to the
attainment of this true felicity is the present method
of owning and holding property. Control of suffi-
cient " means of consumption " is to Godwin an
essential condition of human happiness. This one
point in his creed distinguishes him from the group
of reformers who surrounded him. Dr. Ogilvy, the
Aberdeen professor of Latin, had preceded Godwin
in pointing out the fatal consequences to the com-
munity of private ownership of land and its rent,
but if Dr. Ogilvy was the precursor of Henry George,
Godwin was the precursor of Karl Marx. Godwin

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 33

went to the root of things. English capitalism,
unbridled by legislation, and unrestrained by any
influence but the impetus of its own immediate
requirements, had begun to make those inroads upon
human felicity which mark the times when the
Industrial Eevolution was recreating industrial pro-
cesses and changing our social relationships. From
such conditions, Socialism was born. Godwin's
insistence that society had ultimately to reconsider
both the Economics and the Ethics of property-
holding was the first attempt to comprehend and
express the state which was to grow from the
anarchy of capitalist production.

Charles Hall (1745 ?-1825 ?)

Next in the line of Socialist pioneers comes
Charles Hall, a doctor whose contact with human
misery made him turn his attention to constructive
sociology. Hall's great distinction was that he saw
how little difierence political forms make in economic
facts. Under the American Eepublic, without titles
or nobility, he predicts that every economic problem
which oppressed Europe would grow up. The dis-
tribution of wealth, determined primarily by the
private ownership of the land, settles the amount
of misery there is in " civilisation." *' The labourer,"
observed Hall in his reply to Malthus, '' produces
eight times the amount which it is necessary for

34 SOCIALISM

him to consume, but he starves because those who
produce nothing rob him of the fruits of seven-eighths
of his labour." The spirit of these early Socialists
was that of Rousseau. Vice and poverty are products
of what they called *^ civilisation " — meaning by the
term, an elaborate system of artificiality which on
its economic side destroys the natural right of man
to gain access to the land and consume his products.
*' Civilisation," wrote Paine in his Agrarian Justice,
*' has operated two ways, to make one part of society
more affluent, and the other part more wretched,
than could have been the lot of either in a natural
state."

William Thompson (1783?-1833)

Then, we reach the summit of English Socialist
theory prior to the modern movement. William
Thompson, an Irish landlord of the county of Clare,
was the first of the Socialists to apply the Ricardian
formula, that all wealth is produced by labour, to
social theory. His Socialism was an economic
system, approaching anarchism in the voluntaryism
of its politics. The combination of politics and
economics, which characterises modern Socialism,
could hardly have been anticipated even by such
seers as those pioneers were, but Thompson saw that
moral voluntaryism, as a guarantee that an industrial
system would work justly, was too weak. The

%^

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 35

economics of Ricardo displayed the problem of
poverty in an exceedingly simple way. Wealth was
created by labour but distributed in accordance with
a system of ownership which secured to rent and
profits a lion's share.

Patrick Colquhoun {174 5-1S20)

Patrick Colquhoun carried the logic of Ricar-
dianism very far in his Treatise on the Wealth,
Power, and Resources of the British Empire,
published in 1814. In this study, Colquhoun
published a " Map of Civil Society " which showed
the distribution of wealth, and which drew in the
most striking way the difference between producer
and non-producer, between him who works much
and possesses little and him who does no work and
possesses much.

Thomas Hodgskin (irdo'l- ? )

This school of Socialist pioneers found its most
popular champion in Thomas Hodgskin, a member
of the staff of the Morning Chronicle, a friend of the
Mill and Bentham group, and one of the most acute
of the Socialist economists before Marx. His
central contention was that capital was in a position
to exact too large a share of the national product.
" The exactions of the capitalist cause the poverty

36 SOCIALISM

of the labourer," is a corollary he approvingly draws
from Ricardian economics.

A crowd of minor agitators, pamphleteers, poli-
ticians— amongst whom Thomas Spence deserves
mention — kept the ferment working, until the time
was ripe for a comprehensive and scientific analysis
and treatment of the problem.

On all these pioneers the same criticism can be
passed. Their criticism was admirable ; the logic
of their analysis was accurate. But they failed
in their constructive proposals. Bray, who came
nearer to the modern Socialist conception than any
of them, when he proposed the organisation of the
workers by trades into great co-operative companies,
still labours under the difficulties of a time when
the State as a great co-operative concern had not
as yet been discovered. Economic analysis and
criticism had gone as far as they could in preparing
the complete Socialist theory ; they had to end with
some futile proposal to moralise society, or to found
voluntary communities, or to recast the medium of
exchange. Socialist theory could not then be dis-
sociated from anarchist practice.

Rohert Oiven (1771-1858)
At the threshold of the nineteenth century these
theories and theorisings suddenly found a powerful
expression in the experiments of Eobert Owen.

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 37

Working, first of all, as a philanthropist who cared for
his employees, he proved that by nurturing the best
that is in human nature, you produce improved types.
His New Lanark acquired world fame. But, by and
by, fundamental questions of the relationships be-
tween capitalism and the worker were forced upon
him by the extreme poverty which followed the
closing of the Napoleonic wars, and in 1817 he
addressed a communication to the Committee
appointed to consider the working of the Poor Law,
in which he pointed out that the distress was caused
because machines were supplanting men, and because
the increase in productive capacity was being turned
into a means of making men more subordinate
to wealth. The communication also contained the
first hints of the Utopian settlements, built from
the idea stuff of Owen's mind, in which social
relationships were to be adjusted as though a new
social organisation could be built up by kindly men
as children build castles with wooden bricks. These
experiments were destined to failure by the laws of
historical growth.

But if Louis Blanc in France united Socialist
theories with democratic politics, Eobert Owen in
England united them with political social experi-
ments like factory laws, democratic education, co-
operation. Trade Unionism, and brought the absolute
theories of economic Socialism into touch with the

38 SOCIALISM

evolutionary processes in English industrial life.
^ His method, not the many mistakes he made in
applying his method, remained to determine the
course of our industrial movement.

Liberalism

Meanwhile, political evolution was proceeding
apace. The struggle for political liberty, begun by
the middle class and reaching the end of its first
stage in 1832, had awakened the working class
to the fact that political power is the arm of
social progress. The law-maker is the sovereign.
The Chartist movement had beaten the foundations
of the existing order like a mighty storm ; it had
died away, but the disturbance it had created
remained to agitate the waters of democracy.
Futile as a storm, it had given rise to agitating
currents which in time were to wear away old
political foundations. Part of the people were
enfranchised in 1868. Society was impregnated
with democracy ; aristocracy and plutocracy existed
only on condition that they made peace with the
democracy ; they became modified in order to enable
them to make that peace ; they faced the task of
*' squaring up " democracy by feasts, Primrose
League dances, social programmes. Imperialist
escapades.

At the same time, the vital forces of a demo-

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 39

cratic society made themselves manifest. Factory
Acts, sanitary laws, expanding markets, enormous
increases in the volume of production removed for a
generation the critical nature of poverty. Poverty
lost its revolutionary power. Owenism, failing in
its Utopian aspects, led democratic effort by chance
into a wide field of voluntary ameliorative experi-
ment which withdrew it for a time from more
revolutionary broodings. The difference between the
classes became the reason for political rather than
for economic and industrial conflict. Thus the
Liberal epoch went by. The Socialist pioneers were
forgotten. They ceased to influence our economists.
Mill did not think it worth his while to know them,
believing that when he referred to Fourier and
Saint- Simon, he was dealing with everything and
everybody of importance to Socialism.

But the stream of Socialist evolution had never
been altogether absorbed in the sands of the Liberal
epoch. A section of the working class had never
been Liberal, because Liberal stood in its eyes
for the triumph of the capitalist employer, or for the
destruction of inter-class personal relationships which
marked the old order at its best, or for some other
aspect of the dominance of wealth over everything
else. This section grew more numerous as Liberal-
ism developed. The success of the "squaring up"
process coupled with these more rational feelings.

40 SOCIALISM

organised anti-Liberal political forces until most of
the great industrial centres had either gone over to
the other side or were tending in that direction.
This tendency was rather anti-Liberal than pro-
Conservative. It was negative rather than positive.
It was no indication that the English workers were
reactionary, but that they had no confidence in the
Party that stood for progress.

Parallel with this political drift was one of
humanism and sentiment. Christian Socialism
raised its emphatic protest against the crucifixion of
humanity on many a factory town Calvary ; the
literary and artistic humanists, of whom Carlyle and
Euskin were the chief, proclaimed that there is no
wealth except the life which commercialism was
sacrificing. Moreover, on the left fringe of the
Liberal Party were camps more hostile to the Whig
centre than to Toryism itself. There were Demo-
cratic Associations, Land Leagues, Eepublican groups.
Home Rule Committees, and similar things ; and
when through the "seventies" and "eighties"
Liberalism capitulated to the Whigs and made itself
responsible for such excursions from Radicalism as
the bombardment of Alexandria and Irish coercion,
these sections of the Left were brought to the point
of secession.

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 41

Socialism

Meanwhile Socialism as a definite theory had
been revived. The political epoch with its Trade
Unionism and Co-operation, and its Liberal Labourism
had starved Socialism as a thickly leaved tree kills
all vegetation beneath it. But the life of the tree
was not to be eternal, and the leaves began to thin.
Socialism had gone to the Continent, where a livelier
imagination, a keener interest in purely intellectual
topics, more despotic and rigid forms of government,
and a greater proneness to resort to revolutionary
methods owing to the political unsettlement of the
nations, gave it an opportunity to grow which it had
not here.

The violent efforts of 1848 exhausted for a time
the vitality of this Socialist movement, and, in
addition, its revolutionary programme and expecta-
tions received a stunning shock. Perfunctory asso-
ciations formed round Weitling's doctrines, and
Cabet's Voyage in Icaria had multitudes of disciples.
But the movement as a definite propagandist organ-
isation had to wait for the three remarkable Germans
whose names will ever be associated with the
fortunes of Socialism — Lassalle, Marx and Engels.
They were of middle-class origin, and the first two
were Jews.

42 SOCIALISM

Lassalle (1825-1864)

Lassalle led off. German Liberalism, in the con-
stitutional struggle with the Monarchy which began
in 1861, was weak. Lassalle revived the democratic
feelings of '48, and in his Working Mens Programme
energetically contended for the establishment of a
social democracy as the next phase in the evolution
of Germany. This brought him into conflict with the
authorities, and this again made him the hero of the
people. In 1863, he addressed to the working men
of Leipzig the Oj^en Letter which started the definite
working-class movement as an independent factor in
politics aiming at economic adjustment by political
means, and which categorically laid down the Iron
Law of Wages as an explanation of human destitu-
tion. The Universal German Working Men's Asso-
ciation was formed, and it agitated for universal
suffrage as a means to Socialist ends. A miraculous
upstirring ensued. Lassalle declared that the
enthusiasm with which he was met was like that
which accompanies the founding of new religions.
But Lassalle had not the temperament to enable him
to take advantage of his opportunities. His intelli-
gence began the Social Democratic movement ; his
temperament bedecked his career with tawdry tinsel
and led him to his fatal duel.

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 43

ifarx (1818-1883)

All this time, Marx, if not with greater insight or
a more brilliant imagination, certainly with a sounder
judgment and a more scientific intellect, was writ-
ing, studying, and agitating from London, where
he had gone in 1849. Marx made Socialism
scientific by approaching it in a scientific attitude
of mind.

The working classes of Europe drew together
again, and in 1864 the international movement
was reorganised, the International Association of
Workino; Men founded, and the Communist Mani-
festo, which had been issued in 1847 but had lain
dormant during the reaction, again became the
handbook of an active agitation.

The Manifesto opens on a high note. Com-
munism is everywhere in Europe. The Powers,
Liberal and Reactionary, are alarmed. What is this
movement ? Its foundation is a belief in the class
struggle. " The history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggles." At present
we are in the midst of a struggle with the bourgeoisie,
which has risen to power by a successful struggle
with the feudal aristocracy. To retain its power it
has to exploit every market in the world, and con-
stantly to revolutionise the instruments and modes
of production. Its instrument is the organisation of

44 SOCIALISM

capital, its method of warfare free competition. It
has no sentiment, no culture. It brings man face to
face with the hard material facts of the struggle for
life. But the victory of the bourgeoisie proceeds
alongside the growing power of the proletariat.
The small capitalist is crushed out and joins the
working class ; the working class herded into towns
becomes conscious of its mass and power and
organises itself; political and industrial collisions
take place which become more and more bare class
conflicts ; a time is reached when part of the
bourgeoisie, moved by intellectual motives, go over
from their own class to that of the proletariat ;
and, finally, to this new class movement, becoming
conscious of itself and its meaning, victory is in-
evitable. Being the whole nation, its triumph will
not be a class triumph, however. It is the last of
the class struggles.

The second section of the Manifesto deals with
the relations between the Proletarians and the Com-
munists. The Communists declare that the proletarian
struggle is international, and that the conflict in the
various nations must not be split up into sectional de-
mands, but must be organised into a united proletarian
movement. The practical proposal of the Com-
munists is that the working classes should possess
themselves of supreme political power ; their
theoretical proposals are not the result of idealistic

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 45

imagination, but of a study of history and of the
movement of contemporary events. The Com-
munists do not intend to abolish private property.
Whose private property is supposed to be in danger ?
Bourgeois property is not earned. It is the accumu-
lated result of proletarian labour. The workman
does not earn property for himself; he produces
capital which the bourgeoisie use for his further
exploitation. Under Communism capital will not
be destroyed. It will only lose its class-exploiting
character. "Communism deprives no man of the
power to appropriate the products of society : all
that it does is to deprive him of the power to
subjugate the labour of others by means of such
appropriation." In scathing terms the Manifesto
replies to the base attacks which had already begun
that Communism means to destroy family life, re-
ligion, and " eternal truths " like justice, morality,
freedom. This part closes with a programme
demanding abolition of private property in land, a
progressive income-tax, certain changes in property-
holding, like the concentration of credit in the State,
nationalisation of the means of transport, further
extensions of State activity in production, the
making of work compulsory upon all, an organisation
of industry which will fuse town and country into
an industrial unit, free education, the abolition of
child labour.

46 SOCIALISM

Another section criticises the Socialist^ move-
ments of the time. There is " Feudal " Socialism —
the Socialism of the patron ; " Petty Bourgeois "
Socialism — the Socialism which seeks to go back
on old methods of production, and which does not
admit that the economic relations of modern
society must be fundamentally altered ; German or
"True" Socialism — the Socialism of vague humani-
tarian phrases which cannot be crystallised into
economic doctrine ; '* Conservative or Bourgeois "
Socialism — the social reform Socialism ; " Critical-
Utopian " Socialism — the Socialism of the transition,
when the problem of the proletariat is under-
stood as to its facts but not as to its communist
remedy.

The Manifesto ends with a statement of the
relations between the Communists and the other
political parties. " In all these movements they
bring to the front, as the leading question in each,
the property question, no matter what its degree
of development at the time." The final sentences
ascend in a crescendo of force to that appeal which
is thundered to-day from platforms all over the
world, and is inscribed in every tongue on the banners
of the working-class movement : " The proletarians

^ I must again remind my readers of the distinction between
Communism and Socialism which existed when the Manifesto was
published. See p. 29.

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 47

have nothing to lose but their chains. They have
a world to win. Workers of all countries unite ! "

Engels tells us that after the Commune and the
other changes which took place in the last thirty
years of the nineteenth century, Marx felt that
the Manifesto should be redrafted. But that was
never done, and the original document still remains
as the most prominent landmark in the history of
the political labour movement.

The " International " was a premature birth.
Vigorous national Socialist parties had first to
be created. This was done in the last three decades
of the nineteenth century, and in 1889 it was again
revived. Congresses at which representatives from
all parts of the world have attended, have been held
in Paris ( 1 8 8 9 and 1 9 0 0 ), in Brussels ( 1 8 9 1 ), in Zurich
(1893), in London (1896), in Amsterdam (1904),
and in Stuttgart (1907).

Great Britain — Recent Developments

But I must return to the British movement.

A nucleus of Socialists always remained through
the generation of Liberalism — a few Chartists, a few
Owenites, a few exiles from foreign countries. In
addition to that, one section of the Socialist creed,
Land Nationalisation in some form or other, had
always had the support of a reputable number of
British public men, and the denial of an ultimate

48 SOCIALISM

and incontrovertible right to ownership of the soil
had always been an axiom with British publicists.
George's Progress and Poverty came in 1881 as a
revolutionary force. It familiarised people with the
idea of common use of property, of common creation
of values, of common claims to share in aggregate
wealth. It led them to discuss the problem of
poverty, not as the result of personal short-
coming, but as an aspect of a certain form of social
organisation.

By this time the problem of poverty and the
share of the worker in the produce of his wealth
had again come to the surface of public concern.
We were prepared to take up the thread of the
Socialist controversy at the point where Thompson,
^ Hodgskin, and Bray left it. The expedient of
Nationalisation as applied to land suggested the
expedient of Nationalisation as applied to other
things. Chapters from Marx were published and
read as sequels to Progress and Poverty. There
were unemployed agitations and controversies. The
historical Industrial Remuneration Conference met
in London in 1885 and received much attention, and
whilst this marshalling of the forces making for a new
birth in British politics was going on, a Socialist
organisation had been formed in 1884 under the
title of the Social Democratic Federation ; Christian
Socialism lifted up its head again and gave life to the

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 49

Guild of St. Matthew, which had been started in 1876
as a democratic Church society; whilst in 1884 the
Fabian Society was founded for propaganda purposes.

By this time, criticism of existing conditions
could be supplemented by an adequate theory of
reconstruction. The democratic franchise had given
rise to a positive theory of the State. The voluntary
communities of Owenism had become the national
and the civic communities. The whole people,
willing and acting through town councils, Parlia-
ment, administrative departments, were to control
the means of production, were to establish a
machinery of distribution which would not result in
giving an unjust share of the national wealth to
rent and interest. I must emphasise this change in
political thought which took place between the time
of Owen and the founding of the Social Democratic
Federation, and which was the result of the work
of the Liberal epoch, because it alone made it
possible for Socialism to advance beyond its Utopian
stage. The experiences and the conception of the
State which enabled it to take the place of the
voluntary associations to which the pioneer Socialists
were always driven, is of major importance in the
history of the evolution of Socialism.

But even then that evolution in Great Britain
was not complete. The organisations created thus
far failed to penetrate into the mass of the British
4

50 SOCIALISM

workers. The foreign outlook, phrases and criticisms
of the Social Democratic Federation never quite
fitted themselves into British conditions ; whilst the
Fabian Society, much more successful in adapting
Socialism to British evolution, never succeeded in
applying it to the movements of contemporary
politics, and never faced the problem of how to
organise the masses so that they might be available
for the advancement of Socialist legislation.

The great Trade Union movement had been
neglected. Then it held a unique position, for it
was to be found in no other country. It was class-
conscious with a vengeance. It was organised to
protect the wage-earner from the capitalist. It was
separated into trade sections — engineers, cotton
operatives, miners, etc. — and that was its great
weakness whenever it attempted to formulate a
national policy. It had its annual Congress which
discussed politics and passed resolutions relating to
the working class as a whole. But the Congress
only passed resolutions to lay them at the feet of
Cabinet Ministers. It was Liberal and its leaders
were Liberal, whilst some of the ablest of the younger
Trade Unionists were Socialists. None of the exist-
ing Socialist organisations appeared to be competent
to handle this situation, and until it was handled.
Socialism had to remain obscurantist, academic,
foreign, critical, and impotent in England.

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 51

This last chapter in the preliminaries to the
placing of the Socialist movement on a national
foundation in this country, consists of a series of
interesting events, all of which deserve detailed
study. Local Labour Parties arose in industrial
centres like Bradford and Manchester ; the London
Dock Strike gave rise to the new Unionism ; at the
Trade Union Congresses between Dundee in 1889
and Norwich in 1894, a small handful of men
challenged the rule of the Liberal ofHcials ; during
the Congress at Glasgow in 1892, a private con-
ference was held, and this resulted in the formation
of the Independent Labour Party at Bradford in the
following year.

With the formation of the Independent Labour
Party, Socialism in Great Britain entered upon a
new phase. Continental shibboleths and phrases
were discarded. The propaganda became British.
The history which it used, the modes of thought
which it adopted, the political methods which it
pursued, the allies which it sought for, were all
determined by British conditions. One thing in
particular did the new Party see — in fact, it was
created to see this thing. Socialism as a political
force and as a creative agency in Great Britain would
remain feeble until it gained the confidence and the
co-operation of the industrial organisation of the
workers. The struggle between the old school and

52 SOCIALISM

the new in Congress calmed down, but it took place
every year. At Cardiff, in 1895, the old school fired
its last effective shot when it altered the constitution
of Congress so that only paid officials and those
actually working at their trades could be recognised
as delegates. The shot did not take effect. In
1899, at Plymouth, the new school won decisively,
and a resolution was passed instructing the Parlia-
mentary Committee to convene a conference, to
which the Socialist organisations were to be invited,
to consider if the various sections of the working-
class and Socialist movements could co-operate for
political purposes and create some organisation to
that end. The Conference met in the Memorial
Hall, London, on the 27th February 1900. One
hundred and seventeen delegates were present re-
presenting sixty-seven Trade Unions, seven repre-
senting the Independent Labour Party, four the
Social Democratic Federation, one the Fabian
Society. A private consultation between the leaders
of the various sections had taken place some days
before, at which an agreement had been arrived at,
and this agreement, somewhat weakened by the
Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union
Congress, became the agenda of the Conference.
The result was the formation of the Labour Repre-
sentation Committee. Before the Committee had
been properly formed, the elections of 1900 were

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 53

sprung upon it, but the first test of its strength
came when, in 1906, it ran fifty candidates for
Parliament and returned thirty. That year its
name was changed to tlie Labour Party.

When I come to deal with the approach to the
Socialist State I shall discuss the relations between
the Socialist organisations and the Labour Party a
little more fully, but in order to complete this rapid
survey of the growth of Socialism in this country, I
need only indicate how these movements are now
related to each other, and the following table enables
readers to see this relationship at a glance :

LABOUR PARTY

Trade Independent Fabian Social Democratic

Unions Labour Party Society Federation

SOCIALISM

This is how the Socialist and Labour forces are
marshalled to-day for their further advance.

CHAPTER III

THE INDUSTRIAL ARGUMENT

Economists tell us that wealth is produced by the
co-operation of three primary factors — land, labour,
and capital. Sometimes it is denied that capital is
a primary factor because it is merely the stored
results of past labour ; sometimes it is said, with
Adam Smith, that labour is the source of all wealth
because without labour both capital and land are
inert and dead.

We need not quarrel about these technical points,
provided we know what we mean when we use the
words.

Socialism, however, has become most intimately
attached to the proposition of Adam Smith, which,
coming through Ricardo, was made the foundation of
Socialist economics by Marx, that labour is the
source of all wealth and the basis of value ; and
Socialist economic aims have become identified with
the demand that the worker has a right to the whole
produce of labour.^

1 " The produce of labour constitutes the natural recompense or
wages of labour." — Wealth of Nations, i. 8. "It is the comparative

54

THE INDUSTRIAL ARGUMENT 55

A criticism of these economic dogmas is generally
held to be a reply to Socialism. But this is a
mistake. The Ricardo - Marx economics can be
knocked on the head at any time, and Socialism
would not suffer in the least. These dogmas are
explanations of Socialism, not its foundations.
Their discredit would no more destroy the rationality
of the Socialist structure than the discrediting of a
biological working hypothesis like evolution would
destroy biological science.

Production and Distribution

An accurate economic definition of the creation
of values does not, in my opinion, assign them to
labour solely without so greatly stretching the
meaning of labour as to do serious violence to the
ordinary use of language. Capital is an invaluable
tool in the hands of labour, and the efficiency of
labour varies directly with the efficiency of the
organisation of capital. Labour's quarrel with
capitalism is not in the sphere of production
but in that of distribution. Moreover, an accurate
theory of distribution would not assign to labour
the whole value of its production, because there are
certain communal charges upon national wealth which

quantity of commodities which labour will produce that determines
their past or present relative values." — Principles of Political Economy
and Taxation^ chap. i.

56 SOCIALISM

must be met if the civic and political conditions
of labours well-being are to be maintained.^

Capitalism has been created to develop the
machinery of production, and it has done its work
very well. A hundred years ago our national
annual income was £270,000,000 ; to-day it is
£1,700,000,000. The desire for profits has led
the industrial nations — which for this purpose pride
themselves in applying the term "civilised" to
themselves exclusively — to enter into relationships
with the most remote and obscure corners of the
earth. They have covered the world with a net-
work of lines of communication. They have turned
the globe into one great market. Exchange,
hampered here and there by artificial barriers raised
by nationalism expressing itself as economic policy,
proceeds between the most primitive of peoples little
removed from the brutes and the most cultured and
advanced. The Manchester cotton prince relies on
the Boxer for part of his income, and the Boxer
becomes a revolutionary because the profits he pays

^ It may be argued, and I do argue so, that the values taken by the
community in the shape of rates and taxes should be levied so that
they are those values created by the community as a whole. The
Socialist theory of taxation and rating is based upon the assumption,
somewliat inconsistent with earlier Socialist economics, that value is
created otherwise than by labour. The " total produce of labour " is
thus less than the total national production of value. But if these
socially created values were not sufficient to meet the costs of govern-
ment, claims would legitimately lie against individual incomes.

THE INDUSTRIAL ARGUMENT 57

to Lancashire enable and necessitate the building
of railways in China. Further, in order to keep up
an uninterrupted exchange between Lancashire and
China, Uganda must be made a cotton - growing
country, and the Southern States of America be
deprived of their monopoly in cotton cultivation.
The romance of Capitalism is quite as marvellous as
any tale of the Crusades, quite as gorgeous as any
of the Arabian Nights, quite as magnificent in its
demonstration of the power of human will as any
story of the great conquering epochs of the world's
history.

But eventually the triumph of production will
be judged by the equity of distribution. The
Lancashire cotton operative spins and weaves, not
that railw^ays may be built in China, but that his
cupboard may be full, his back clothed, and his head
sheltered under a decent house. And if you tell
him that in these respects he is better ofi" than his
grandfather — far better ofi" — he will reply to the
efi'ect that he himself and not his grandfather is his
standard of content and measure of discontent, and
that he knows nothing about his grandfather's
comforts or discomforts but a great deal about his
own ; or, if he goes a little deeper in searching for a
reply, he will say that the relationship which is the
motive force in his life is not that between his
grandfather and himself, but between himself as he

58 SOCIALISM

is and himself as he desires to be. The future is
not created by contemplating the achievements of
yesterday, but by contemplating the promises of to-
morrow. The potential of progress is derived not
from the past that has been, but from the future
that is still to be. Therefore, Capitalism will not be
judged by this generation according to what it has
done as an agent in production, but according to
what it is doing as an agent in distribution.

Capitalism, described from the point of view of
distribution, presents a spectacle almost as extra-
ordinary as it does from that of production. Under
it, land, capital, and labour, the three essentials to
production, have been separated in their immediate
interests, and upon them have been created three
classes which divide the national product between
them, not on any basis of equity, or of the value
of the services they respectively render, but in
accordance with the economic power they possess
under any given circumstances. At one time — a
rising market — labour can exact its demands from
capital, at another — a falling market — capital can
exact its demands from labour ; and the only
meaning attached to the identity of the interests of
both is, that capital occasionally discovers that
starved labour is inefficient labour, and that labour
occasionally experiences that capitalist losses mean
a diminished demand for labour. Meanwhile, the

THE INDUSTRIAL ARGUMENT 59

land interest manages to prey upon both, and
rising rents in towns, equally with rural depopula-
tion and depression in agricultural values, show the
triumph of the landed classes/ These three factors,
therefore, instead of being co-operative are antag-
onistic and agree to work together only after settling,
like footpads, what their individual shares are to be.
Thus we get our land passing from the control
of those who use it and becoming vested in those
who abuse it for their own pleasure. It is controlled
so as to suit the wishes and convenience of the
landlords rather than the wishes and convenience of
the whole of the community. We have, for instance,
landlords like the Sutherlands burning their tenants'
houses about their heads when it was convenient
to put estates under sheep farms, and then, when
circumstances have changed, asking the town
dwellers to submit to a dearer loaf in order to
repopulate the places made waste by sheep farms
and deer forests. Landlordism has meant every-
where a depopulated country and overcrowded
towns, or, as an alternative, artificially high rents
paid for from the high prices which a fiscal policy
allows the landed interest to impose upon food.

^ Therefore, although private ownership in land as a matter of
historical fact appears in the capitalist period, it is not economically
essential to it. Its persistence is owing to the fact that capitalism
trembles to challenge the right and utility of any kind of property.
Capitalism defends all property in order to preserve its own.

60 SOCIALISM

The Organisation of Production

Nor has Capitalism, in its own sphere, ever
given the least hope that it was creating an organisa-
tion which would equitably distribute wealth. It
has two stages in its development : the first when
it is subject to free internal competition ; the second
when it is controlled either by regular Trusts or by
widely spread agreements which reduce competition
to a minimum.

The first stage was antecedent to the universal
world market and to persistent international com-
petition on that market. During it, there were
many opportunities presented to labour to become
economically independent, because local industry for
a local market was still important in national
economy, and there was also a close personal touch
between employer and employed. Production and
exchange had not become so organised as to have
ceased to be personal. Competition between pro-
ducers was, on the whole, carried on on terms of
equality because capitalist machinery was not much
developed, and for this same reason the workman
was still a craftsman and could produce the articles
of his trade in all their parts. The distribution
which followed on that state of things was tolerable,
but it could not last. It was only a beginning.

The second stage is marked by the organisation

THE INDUSTRIAL ARGUMENT 61

of production on a large scale. Village needs are
supplied from factories hundred of miles away.
Local habits and styles disappear and conform to
general habits and styles. The Joint-Stock Company
takes the place of personal undertakings, industries
amalgamate, a corporation grows until it covers the
main transactions in a given trade, it comes to
agreements with its rivals, it acquires interests in
businesses which either supply it with raw materials
or sell its finished products, until at length it is not
an industry but an economic group of industries
controlled by one capitalist combination.

This process may be illustrated in the develop-
ment of a few of our great iron and steel working
businesses. I may instance the firm of the Bells,
the famous ironmasters.^ The firm was established
in 1844, and began with furnaces and coal and iron
mines and limestone quarries. In 1873, it became
a private limited liability company, and in 1899 its
shares were put upon the market. In 1898, it
started new steel works, and Dorman, Long, & Co.
took half of the new shares then issued. This firm
also had a history. Started in 1876, it became a
limited liability company in 1889. In 1879, it
assimilated a rival firm, the Britannia Works ; in

^ For the particulars given, I am indebted to that laborious study
in Trusts and Combinations, The Trust Movement in British Industry,
by Henry W. Macrosty, and to it I refer those who wish to study
the matter more fully.

62 SOCIALISM

1899, it swallowed up the sheet works of Messrs.
Jones Bros., and the wire works of the Bedson Wire
Co. In 1902, the interests of the Bell and the
Dorman, Long firms w^ere more closely united by a
rearrangement of capital holdings. To strengthen
the position of the firm, the North-Eastern Steel Co.,
manufacturing a different kind of product, was
acquired in 1903, the latter company explaining to
its shareholders that the amalgamation was largely
owing to the fact that the Dorman and the Bell
firms were in a superior position owing to their
possessing mines and quarries of coal and iron.
The original Bell capital was only a few thousand
pounds ; the capital of the amalgamated firms now
stands at £3,059,594.

The evolution of the firm of Sir W. G. Arm-
strong, Whitworth, & Co. is an even more interesting
study. The original firm gained a name as makers
of ordnance. In 1882, it amalgamated with ship-
builders; in 1897, with engineers; in 1899, with
locomotive and marine engineers; in 1906, with
torpedo makers. The capital manipulated is now
£5,710,000.

Equally interesting is the evolution of firms like
John Brown & Co. of Sheffield. This firm originally
made steel rails and armour plates. In 1870, it
bought coal mines and ore fields and erected
furnaces. In 1899, it assimilated the Clydebank

THE INDUSTRIAL ARGUMENT 63

Engineering and Shipbuilding Co. , with an enormous
annual output of ships, battleships, marine engines.
In 1902, it acquired seven-eighths of the shares of a
rival Sheffield firm. The capital is now £2,200,000.

The United States Census of 1905 enables one
to see at a glance the general effect of such
movements. According to that Census, out of
216,262 factories in the United States, 162,000, or
75 per cent., were owned by individuals separately
or in partnership, and 51,000, or 23 per cent., by
corporations ; but whereas the 75 per cent, worked
a capital of only $2,150,000,000, the 23 per cent,
worked a capital of $10,510,000,000, or 83 per cent,
of the capital shown to be invested in industrial
concerns in the country. 1,600,000 wage-earners
were employed by the former, 3,800,000 by the
latter.

Germany tells the same tale.^ In 1886, there
were 1337 Joint-Stock Companies with 1,904,000
Marks capital; in 1896, there were 2307, and their
capital was 3,512,000 Marks. Many of these in the
latter year were federated for competitive purposes.
In 1882, 123 businesses employed over 1000 persons
each ; by 1895 there were 248 such businesses.

These instances make the movement of amalg:ama-
tion and co-ordination clear. Separate industrial
processes that are interdependent tend to be

^ Howard's Industrial Progress of Germany^ pp. 70 et 'passim.

64 SOCIALISM

amalgamated. Labour is obedient to the law of
subdivision ; capital to the law of concentration.

Industrial organisation obeys a law of economy.
When capital has to be supplied by a class that
takes no further part in production, that class
becomes a burden upon the community, and the
vitality of the community bends itself to get rid
of that class. When an organism is bearing useless
organs, or organs which do their work badly, its
vitality tries to effect economies, because the con-
dition of its existence is that it can work economi-
cally. Hence these industrial phenomena which I
have been describing. Hence also the Socialist
movement.^

The Organisation of Distribution
Under this system, distribution becomes markedly
inequitable. The good and worthy man rising to
success is now almost an old wife's tale. As the
economic machine becomes more and more perfect
and the personal relationship in it disappears, con-

1 During the summer of 1905, James T. Hill, the American railroad
magnate, wrote to the New York Herald pointing out how inefficiently
the natural wealth of America was being used. The New York Times,
commenting upon Mr. Hill's statement, said : " It is perfectly true, as
Mr. Hill says, that 'what is needed the country over is a great
awakening, a sort of revival in its business methods, in domestic and
foreign trade.' We want to rid ourselves of 'the hampering
influences.'" That is just what Socialists say. A study of "the
hampering influences " is an introduction to Socialism.

THE INDUSTRIAL ARGUMENT 65

siderations of personal worth are of less importance
in success, and the law of the survival of the most
adaptable selects men specialised as economic
machines for the control of industries. This change
must be apparent to everybody. The value placed
upon bare riches rises rather than falls in spite of
our education and our culture, and the pressure
which vast economic interests now bring to bear
upon every outlet of public life from the House of
Commons to the Church of God increases. The
economic machine gets more important ; its drivers
get more powerful and wield greater influence ; social
classes become stereotyped.^ Capital swells in volume
every year. Sometimes it is so easily available —
either because there is plenty of it or because there is
not much demand for it — that it is cheap ; sometimes
it is dear. But in spite of fluctuations it mounts up
upon the back of labour. There is hardly a public
company in the country that has been anything like
successful at one time or another of its life, but is
carrying a load of capital which is too heavy for it.
Its stock has either been watered or has been bought
at premium rates on the market, and it has now to
provide profits for capital which it never spent and
never put to any use.

^ That a few men pass from one class to another is no disproof of
this statement. The classes remain, and they change less as a whole
than they did before our present vast accumulations of wealth.

5

66 SOCIALISM

Thus the aggregate of profits rises in every
prosperous country, and so does the aggregate of
rent. Wages of management and labour may also
increase, but part of their increase is purely
nominal, and substantial improvements, amounting
to any considerable portion of that extra reward of
labour which is available owing to new machinery
and the more efficient organisation of labour and of
markets, are made impossible owing to the in-
dustrial mechanism which allows unearned incre-
ments in rent to pass into private pockets, and
the advantages of industrial improvements to be
capitalised and sold on the market, and thus
be burdened by the weight of exploiting invest-
ments.^

Thus it came about that the portion of the
national income which went in rents in 1890
was about £230,000,000, whilst it amounted to
£290,000,000 in 1900; the portion which went in
interest (not including wages of managing capitalists)
in 1890 was about £280,000,000, whilst in 1900 it
was about £360,000,000 ; whilst that paid in wages
in 1890 was about £530,000,000 for 13,500,000

^ On page 96 of Riches and Poverty, Mr. Money gives a table of
gas companies, showing the difference between the real and the
market value of shares. From this table it appears that, for instance,
the Harrogate Gas Company has to pay interest on £340 for every
£100 capital it has used. The chapter in which this appears is well
worth studying in connection with my argument.

THE INDUSTRIAL ARGUMENT ^7

workers, and in 1904, £690,000,000 was handed
over to 15,000,000 workers/

The further proposition that distribution is, on
the whole, regulated by merit, and is as good as
possible for the purpose of keeping the machine of
production and exchange going, is little removed
from the ridiculous. Who will seriously state that
the enormous wealth of the ground landlords of
London is due to their merits or value ? Who will
say that the great mining landlords of the north-
east of England, of Yorkshire, of the Midlands, have
*' earned" in any way whatever their huge incomes
from mining rents ? And yet the system of land-
lordism which enables both of these classes to flourish
at the expense of the community, is one of the great
determining factors in how wealth once created is to
be distributed. Quite apart from landlordism, the
organisation of capitalism determines the method of
distribution. Some services are absurdly overpaid,
others as absurdly underpaid. The reason is that
the mechanism of competition cannot be applied to
a considerable part of social service. Our present
economic constitution has been built up mainly to
enable wealth to be created and to allow the capitalist
competitors to fight each other ; and this constitution

^ These figures are taken from Fabian Pamphlet No. 5, various
editions. This pamphlet gives interesting information about wealth
distribution, about which limited space prevents me from giving
further details.

68 SOCIALISM

decides the shares into which national wealth is
divided. We are working in a system which makes
an equitable distribution impossible, and the labourer
will not get his proper hire until the system is
changed. Until the machinery of production is
controlled by the community, the volume of pro-
duction will be divided in accordance with the
relative strength of the economic classes which own
the elements necessary to production, and the dis-
tribution secured by such an arrangement will never
materially alter from the present position when, out
of an annual income of £1,170,000,000, 1,250,000
rich persons own £585,000,000, 3,750,000 comfort-
ably-ofF persons own £245,000,000, and 38,000,000
poor persons own £880,000,000.^

Labour and Industrial Organisation

Statistics of material distribution only reflect
many other forms of inequality. The organisation
of capitalist production could only have proceeded
by subdividing to the minutest degree the process
done by any one man in complete productive opera-
tions. The striking figures published in 1898 in a
report on Hand and Machine Labour by the Labour
Department at Washington, have already been much
quoted, and I need only illustrate my point by citing
one industry here. I take that of watchmaking.

1 Riches and Poverty^ by Cliiozza Money.

THE INDUSTRIAL ARGUMENT 69

In 1862, watch movements were made by hand ; in
1896, they were made by machinery, and a comparison
has been made between those two years. It was
found that to produce a certain watch in 1862, 347
operations were required; in 1896, 881. The 347
operations were done by 13 persons, most of whom
were styled watchmakers, and could do practically
every process needed; the 881 operations were
done by a somewhat indefinite number of men and
women — very much greater than 1 3 — most of whom
were called " machine hands" or " bench hands," but
apparently only two small sections, still working by
hand, called themselves watchmakers. None of these
could make a watch.

The effect of this is to make labour more sub-
ordinate to the capitalist machine of production.
The amount of practically unskilled labour is increased
as skill goes into the machinery used, whilst on the
top grades the demand for skill is perhaps greater
than ever. The industrial population is thus divided
by a deep gap, the lower having little training for
the skill required at the top. This threatens society
with serious consequences. Labour tends to be
divided into two grades diametrically opposed in
quality, and yet the recruiting for the higher grade
ought to be done in the lower — unless we are to
again create a class economically more subject than
any class of hewers of wood and drawers of water

70 SOCIALISM

ever has been. Production organised for individual
profit actually flourishes for a time on the very-
conditions which create the unskilled workman, the
casual labourer, the improvident jack-of- all-trades,
the unemployed and unemployable. The stream of
labour under the old apprenticeship and craftsman
era was from below upwards — apprentice, journeyman,
foreman, master ; now, it is right across, the youth
being put to some mechanical process which leads to
nothing else, and when he asks for more wages, or
when more skill is required of him, he is passed out
on to the street and has to pick up a new job, which,
in the nature of things, will have little relation to
his earlier employment.

The upward stream is maintained in a somewhat
enfeebled way by technical schools and colleges, and
as these are always liable to become preserves of the
well-to-do, or are opened only to the children of the
poor who at an early age, before their inclinations
and tastes are really fixed, can pass competitive
examinations, this method of supplying the higher
branches of industry will tend to stereotype industrial
classes and to supply an ansemic management for
our industrial organisation.^ The individuality, the

1 " Here (America) men enter business in a subordinate position
with the hope of learning it with their daily duties, and they expect
to be promoted according to the cleverness and ability with which
they learn the business. In Germany, a man could not hope to rise
to the higher administrative positions unless he received special

THE INDUSTRIAL ARGUMENT 71

energy, the concentration of attention, which was
secured under the first stage of industrial organisation
must become enfeebled under the second. The first
stage could not be made permanent because it was
subject to a law of growth, and, therefore, one of
the most pressing problems of the second stage is
how to maintain its organisation and yet preserve
skill and initiative amongst the workers throughout.
The feeble and querulous complaints against ** ca'
canny" policies, against the thumb-like skill, against
the industrial habits of the workers made by middle-
class critics of our present industrial state, are
hopeful, inasmuch as they indicate that by and by
with more information and a good deal more reflec-
tion, these critics may grasp the real nature of the
problem revealed by one or two surface manifestations
about which they are uttering wails of class prejudice
and ignorance.^

If society suffers by the subordination of skill to
individual profit, the workman is put in a still more
parlous position. The man who is only a workman
in one department of a factory is exceedingly helpless.
He builds his house on an alarmingly narrow basis.
He is bound to a place almost as rigidly as though

training therefor, in most cases training in a school outside the
business itself. . . . Consequently we have in Germany a special class
of schools for each grade of worker." — Howard's Industrial Progress of
Germany, p. 98.

^ Cf. Professor Flinders Petrie's Janus in Modern Life.

72 SOCIALISM

Parliament had enacted a new Law of Settlement.
Under the machine production of boots and shoes,
for instance, a man is not a shoemaker and is quite
useless away from his machine. Outside Leicester,
or Northampton, or Norwich, he is an unskilled
labourer. He cannot bring himself into direct touch
with the consumer as his grandfathers did when
they were shoemakers. This means a serious limita-
tion of liberty, a serious increase of precariousness.
It means that the difference between unemployed
and unemployable is very narrow, because it makes
a man's ability to earn a living depend upon his
being able to fit himself into such a limited and
definite set of circumstances ; it means that when a
man can no longer work in a factory, he can hardly
work at all. The machine of production brought to
perfection under individualism involves a serious
limitation on a man's freedom and chances of being
able always to earn a livelihood. Individualistic
production needs as a supplement charity, pauperism,
public relief works, old age pensions, assistance to
keep family life in existence. The individual, under
it, not being allowed to provide for himself, claims
assistance from others, and suffers the moral degrada-
tion which accompanies such assistance. Family
life deteriorates, family instincts — paternal affection,
the art of housewifery — disappear. Industrial
exigencies disintegrate all spiritual social organisation.

THE INDUSTRIAL ARGUMENT 73

And the possession of wealth forms no defence
against this disintegration. The people do not
suffer because they are poor ; all men are subject
to the same disease — the blight of profit-making and
of commercialism on life. Thus industrial perfection
in production involves the deterioration of human
qualities.

In summary, the effect of our present development
of industry is to organise capital and create interests
which threaten to dominate our political and civic
existence by putting the life of the State under the
control of a few commercial syndicates ; ^ to sub-
ordinate human interests to capitalist profit which,
to an increasing extent, can be made oflf a deteriorating
people, and which, as it must be made at once, cannot
afford to take long views and subordinate immediate
and apparent gains to permanent and real ones ; to
create a machinery of production which does not
secure equitable distribution ; to give rise to ethical
demands which it cannot satisfy, and hence to compass
its own destruction.

^ This pure evolution of capitalism has not been manifested so
much here as in America, mainly because we have a social history
whicli mingles with and colours the pure industrial stream of tendency.
But we must be watchful even here. Mr. Macrosty in his work on
Trusts quotes from the Economist of the 12th August 1899 : " It is
undeniable that during the session just ended, there has been an
atmosphere of money in the lobby and precincts of the House of
Commons, scarcely known before. All manner of interests have
gathered there as they gather in Washington and in the various State
Legislatures of America."

74 SOCIALISM

Socialism and Production

Lest, however, it should be assumed that the
emphasis which Socialists place upon distribution as
the final test of whether an industrial system is or
is not satisfactory, indicates that they neglect the
conditions of effective production, I must point out
that under Socialism the efficiency of production
developed by capitalism will not only be preserved
but improved. Mechanical invention will be en-
couraged and utilised to the utmost. To-day we
observe a feeling of resentment on the part of labour
against machinery, but that is due to the undeniable
fact that every readjustment of industry caused by
discoveries of more efficient means of production
involves suffering to the workers, displacement of
labour, further exploitation. This may not be the
case when the whole of society is taken into account,
but at the points affected it is the case, and the
workman, just like the capitalist, takes short views.
The failure of the present system is that under it, it
is difficult for either capitalists or workmen to see
that the well-being of the whole involves the
well-being of every individual. Under Socialism,
however, all that will be changed. More efiicient
production will then mean more efficient distribution.
The man in the workshop will not be an economic
alien to the owner of the machines with which he

THE INDUSTRIAL ARGUMENT 75

works, and, consequently, machinery which to-day is
labour-substituting will then be in reality what it is
now only nominally, labour-saving.

Moreover, the present system is both wasteful
from a business point of view and unjust from an
ethical point of view. The Trust and syndicate
develop largely owing to the necessity of securing
economy in working. That this is so is somewhat
obscured as yet by the fact that so many Trusts
have been promoted by speculating capitalists. But
it is notorious that the Steel Corporation found it
most economical to close down plants. The Whisky
Trust closed sixty-eight out of eighty distilleries, and
then kept up production to its old level. Mr.
Edgerton ^ quotes with approval the opinion of an
expert that '* there is nail machinery enough in this
country [America] to produce four times as many
nails as can be sold." Professor J. W. Jenks,^
reporting on an inquiry made by the United States
Government, says under the heading of " Closing of
Plants " : " Seventeen of the combinations reported
that some of the plants that had been taken into the
organisation have been closed. . . . The proportion of
the capacity of the plants closed to the total manu-
facturing capacity of the combinations has varied

^ Trusts, Tools, and Corporations. Edited by Professor Riplej'',
p. 70.

2 Bulletin of the Department of Labour, 1900, p. 674, etc.

76 SOCIALISM

from 1 per cent, to as high as 25 per cent." It
is true that this closing process goes on without
Trust organisation, but it is by bankruptcy and ruin
— surely the very worst of all methods.

But these oro^anisations can go much farther in
these directions than has hitherto been the case,
and, meanwhile, a recital of such facts makes it
evident that fabulous waste is involved every year
in carrying on competition in those industries which
have not been organised into Trusts, and in the
anarchistic method of distribution which fills whole
streets with rival shops and warehouses and keeps
bankruptcy officials busy. If everything that is said
in praise of competition were true it would be dearly
bought.

The figures of bankruptcies alone are most
eloquent. The Inland Revenue benefits every year
by about £50,000 for stamps issued in connection
with industrial wreckage;^ £110,000 is spent in
paying salaries to officers, and £22,000 goes for
remuneration to County Court Registrars. The
losses to creditors by settlement under the
Bankruptcy Acts each year on the average in
England and Wales alone, since 1900, have been
£5,000,000, and under deeds of arrangement
£2,800,000. This is, of course, not all economic
loss, as part of these sums represent the cost of

^ Accounts of Bankruptcy f Parliamentary Paper 130, 1907.

THE INDUSTRIAL ARGUMENT 11

experiments in industrial methods — costs, however,
which ought not to be borne by individual but
by national income. The lack of any attempt to
estimate what needs are, and to regulate the use
of productive power accordingly, not only means
terrible extravagance in manufacture, but unsettle-
ment in industry, because it leads to overproduction,
to glutted markets, to loss of capital, to unemploy-
ment, and contributes to those psychological panics,
when the public will risk nothing and invest
nothing, which cause financial and commercial
crises. The individualistic, anarchistic, happy-go-
lucky, devil - take - the - hindmost way in which
production is conducted and markets scrambled
for to-day, is a negation of law and order, and a
cynical challenge to the human intelligence to charm
chaos into cosmos.

The apologists of this disorder find consolation
in telling us that it enables the consumer to pick
out what he likes, to award those who please him
and send into bankruptcy those who cannot gauge
public needs. This, of course, is mainly fancy with
a tinge of truth in it. A man who genuinely tries
to manufacture soap bubbles will come to grief, but
if he can do a little swindle at the same time by
lying advertisements or judicious manipulation on the
Stock Exchange, he will be able to purchase a peerage.

On the other hand, there is little margin

78 SOCIALISM

for variation on the ordinary markets. The arts
employed in the production of clothing, for example,
— the texture, colours, make-up, — are now not the
subject of " trade secrets." They are common
possessions. The artistic taste and the scientific
skill are developed and moulded by schools, colleges,
technical classes, art galleries, craft exhibitions.
The individualistic exploitation of a happy idea is,
therefore, not only less justifiable as a matter of
economic equity than it used to be, but it is also less
necessary as a reward encouraging others to show
initiative and inventiveness.

When we carefully consider the reasons why this
waste of competition is tolerated, why a great
standing army of travellers, advertising agents, bill-
posters, printers are maintained at an enormous
charge upon national income, and expense upon
national consumption, involving terrible waste of
service that otherwise would be available for other
purposes, we see that it is necessary simply because
the law of competition is in the main that one man's
business must be built up at the cost of another
man's business. The volume and the quality of
consumption are not increased thereby ; the appor-
tionment of trade and profits between individual
competitors is the main thing afiected. But all this
army is a dead weight upon the producing com-
munity. A writer has estimated that in 1890

THE INDUSTRIAL ARGUMENT 79

between 50 and 60 per cent, of the total production
of the United States was dissipated in maintaining
this competition between individual businesses/

When we consider the great savings in the cost
of production which will be effected by Socialist
organisation, — the elimination of the useless classes,
the absorption of sections which are necessary only
as armies in the wars of commercialist competition,
the diversion of wealth which now only maintains
individual luxury into channels which will maintain
State efficiency, — we can see how far from the truth
is the fear that under Socialism it will be impossible
for us to carry on foreign trade, or that a Socialist
State could be wiped out of existence by an
industrial competitor. In fact, in foreign trade, a
Socialist State would be paramount because it would
have carried farthest the Law of Economy. We can
also understand how mistaken is the argument that
Socialism will require Protection to preserve itself.
These and similar views are held only by those who
have not made themselves familiar with the Socialist
organisation of industry. If the further considera-
tion, that under Socialism the captains of industry
will be managers, seems to point to inefficiency, it
must not be forgotten that the best of them and
those bearing the greatest responsibilities are only
managers now.

^ Reeve's Cost of CompetiHorif p. 283.

80 SOCIALISM

The rise of the Trusts necessitates some modifi-
cation of the above criticisms. For the Trust
reduces waste and is also always striving to estimate
demand so that it may thereby regulate production.
When the Trust becomes more of a legitimate
business concern than it is as yet, it will do more
in these directions. But the solution of these
problems by Trust only creates further difficulties.
A committee of directors, responsible, not to the
community whose interest is the main thing in-
volved in their transactions, but to the owners of
the capital which they are using, must always
threaten to become a public menace. They hold
the gateway to life. They are like the occupants
of the ancient castles on the Khine. Their conduct
depends upon the question : Will pillage or law
and order pay us better ? Now the sociologist
and politician will say : " Law and order," and they
are right. But the peculiarity of the business
method is that it must have profits now — maximum
profits ; it cannot take long views ; it is feverish,
not cool ; its ends are not sociological values which
show themselves in a generation, but ledger balances
which are struck twice a year. Its answer would be
that of the barons — pillage — though not too much
pillage.

Further, it must be noted that this development
in industrial control assigns to capital a new

THE INDUSTRIAL ARGUMENT 81

position. It creates a pure form of capitalism^
— a special class taking no part in production,
and having no responsibilities in industry. Interest
thus becomes sharply divided from profits in the
ordinary sense and also from wages of management.
It becomes nothing more than income derived from
the loan of capital required by a class which has no
capital, or by a social function — production — which
is as yet depending on a specialised class of investors
for the sustenance of capital which the community
itself ought to have the means of supplying. We
are thus creating a capitalist class as different from
the old employing classes which received the title of
" captains of industry " as the modern factory hand
is different from the old craftsman.

Here we reach the bedrock of our criticism.
Trade and commerce tend more and more to become
widely organised functions and to depart from being
a series of independent transactions carried on by
separate capitalists. The exercise of this function of
trade should be conducive to communal ends or it
may prey upon the communal life, as the appetites
may prey upon the general health of the body, or as
the landlords by depopulating the soil have preyed
upon the national life. When trade and commerce

^ Criticisms upon capitalism must not be confused, as some
opponents of Socialism are always doing, with criticisms on capital.
Capital, capitalist, capitalism are three absolutely distinct things.
The Socialist objects to capitalism.
6

82 SOCIALISM

become organised functions, their communal and
sociological purpose must be definitely set up and
guarded by making the control of the function
communal and sociological, a control which can
never be supplied by capitalism. As the supply of
gas, of water, of trams, of milk that is milk, has
been shown by experience to be most safely placed
in the hands of the community, so will it be found
that the community will be forced to control and
manage other supplies beginning with monopolies,
Trusts, and prime necessities for communal life.

This development is natural and necessary. It
is an attempt to bring order out of chaos, reason
out of chance. It is progress. Production under
competition for the personal profit of the individual
master responsible for his own capital, is a state of
unstable equilibrium. It is youth ; it is not fully
developed manhood. Production ever tends to be
an organised function of the State, carried on not as
a personal matter but by salaried managers respon-
sible, not for their own capital, but for capital
provided from many sources. Thus the Joint-Stock
Company and the Trusts are not the final forms of
production. They are the first stage of impersonal
production. They appear contemporaneously with
municipalisation. They are far removed from
Socialism, but they are still farther from the
individual capitalist employer, and they have

THE INDUSTRIAL ARGUMENT 83

developed in the direction of Socialism. They are not
a modification of the old one-man business ; they
are a fundamental change in it. When Adam Smith
wrote of Joint-Stock Companies, his vision was
limited by his experience, and we are in the same
position to-day in relation to the public control of
industry as he was in 1790 as regards the practica-
bility of Joint-Stock enterprise. He said Banks
only can be controlled as Joint- Stock affairs ; we
say gas and water only can be controlled by public
officials.

To-day we stand on that indefinite territory
where the old is cast off and the new is put on.
Capitalism evolves upwards to organic harmony, not
downwards towards revolution. If, politically, the
first duty of a State is to preserve itself, so economi-
cally, the jBrst duty of a people is to protect the
mechanism of industry by which their economic
powers to consume are secured. So soon as pro-
duction is organised upon a Trust basis and becomes
a social function, it becomes more and more a press-
ing need that the organisation should be controlled
by the people and be part of the communal life of the
people, just like national education, government,
and so on. The nationalisation of production is
just as necessary to democracy — and just as inevit-
able if democracy is to mature into fulness — as the
nationalisation of the sovereign authority by the

84 SOCIALISM

suppression of the personal right of kings to rule.
We must look upon production as a national function,
and not as a task assigned to a class of separate
individuals pursuing their own ends.

This is the case for Socialism. It is the stage
after capitalism ; it is capitalism ripened into a
higher form of trade organisation ; it is the organisa-
tion which includes distribution as well as pro-
duction within its scope, and which reconciles
individual with national prosperity. It is the Law
of Economy moulding industrial forms, creating the
Trust from competitive industry, and extending
the economy of the Trust until it is merged into the
greater economy of Socialism.

CHAPTER IV

SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM

It would be both useless and fruitless for me to try
and even refer to the objections which have been
taken from time to time to Socialism. That the
Socialist is a thief, a scoundrel, and so on, is still
believed by a few unenlightened persons, and they
will possibly continue to believe the libel. The
people who believe these things may be awkward
customers at elections, but it is not given to them
to decide the great lines of national advance. Again,
that Socialism is anarchism, that it means an equal
sharing out, that it is to be a paradise for the lazy
loafers, and similar notions, are so far removed from
Socialist theories as to make any discussion of them
useless. Socialism is a rational criticism of present-
day society, co-ordinating and systematising the
tendencies of the day ; its theories have been built
up and sifted by some of the most acute intellects of
the past centuries, and have been pondered over by
some of the purest spirits of these times. The

85

86 SOCIALISM

Socialist requires to apologise neither for his com-
panions nor for his ideals.

But some objections taken to Socialism by fair-
minded inquirers may be considered, because their
discussion will enable us to understand more clearly
what Socialism is.

Socialism and Liberty

One of the most common errors in the Socialist
controversy is to assume that Socialism and In-
dividualism are two opposing systems of thought —
that, indeed, in modern sociology and politics, they
are the opposing systems. The assumption of the
anti-Socialist is that he is the champion of individual
liberty, and, unfortunately, the Socialist in his eager-
ness to give battle has been too willing to accept the
language of his opponents, and the antithesis. Social-
ism V. Individualism, remains in circulation amongst
current phraseology, and continues to mislead the
unwary as to the real nature of the controversy.

As a matter of fact, it is not individualism that
is at stake at all, but a particular method of express-
ing individualism. Is private ownership of land and
industrial capital necessary in order that men may
enjoy individual freedom and feel to the fullest
extent the power of their individuality ? Are the
needs of individuality to be satisfied only by acquisi-
tions which belong to one's own self, — by ownership

SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 87

as well as use, — or by use only? These are the
questions that are involved in the controversy.
What is individualism ? would express most
accurately the challenge which Socialists throw out.

In the third chapter of this book I have dealt
with this question to some extent. I have shown
that the necessary evolution of industrial structure
has tended to subordinate the individual to the
economic machine of which he is a part, and to
rob him of his freedom of movement by taking
from him his opportunities to become a craftsman.
When I pointed out that a Leicester factory hand is
practically an unskilled labourer — unfitted even to
do navvy work — away from the machine by the help
of which he performs one of the hundred or one
hundred and fifty operations necessary to make a
boot, I indicated a circumstance which cuts right at
the root of individual liberty. Liberty must have
an economic basis. Deprive it of that basis and it be-
comes subject to the will of other people. That basis
is an opportunity of having an independent exist-
ence either by work or by the possession of the fruits
of other people's work. The man who makes whole
things can be master of himself ; the man who makes
part of one thing must be a slave to someone else.

Moreover, every workman knows that he is
subject to victimisation for his opinions. He has
not the right to think. His economic point of view.

88 SOCIALISM

his social theories, his political opinions render his
life precarious.

But this, it may be said, is only an attack upon
the present system, and under Socialism the tyranny
would be greater still. Must we, therefore, con-
template a serious limitation of individual liberty
under Socialism ?

It might appear, at first sight, as though ex-
perience had settled the whole question. From
time to time, experiments of a communist nature
have been tried ranging in their completeness from
Tolstoyan settlements in which everything was held
in common, to Australian land legislation which
barely offended the so-called individualist, but
which sought to establish a system of peasant
leaseholders under State ownership of land. The
Tolstoy communities were ridiculous failures, the
Australian leaseholders agitated to become free-
holders— and thus it may appear that the Socialist
conception of individualism has been proved to be
unpractical.

The facts, however, deserve a little further con-
sideration. The boy who enters the water to learn
to swim goes over the head often and has several
unpleasant experiences before he hits upon the
proper stroke or becomes accustomed to the new
medium. So it is when society and men adopt
new methods of activity. They cannot claim a

SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 89

success until they have had some practice in the
habits of the new activity.

Now, so far as New Harmonies, New Australias,
or Purley Settlements are concerned, the Socialist
has made it quite clear that, in his opinion, they can
prove nothing. Society has become so complex in
its relationships and the machinery of exchange has
become so vast, that these little settlements can
have no influence on the ponderous organisation
outside ; the life in these organisations is so contrary
to what is going on in the world, and their virtues
are so akin to the vices of the barbarian, that their
failure is a practical certainty from their beginning.
The method of social change is not the establishment
of ideal communities that may lie in the midst of
capitalist society like oases in a barren desert, but
the gradual readjustment of social classes and
functions so that in the end society will consist of
people co-operating by service to create a wealth
and well-being which will be adequately shared by
every producer.

Hence it is that even if communist communities
were more successful than they are — and they have
not always been so great failures as they are made
out to be — the Socialist would not lay much stress
upon their success, because they would not help him
very much in his task of altering the industrial and
economic organisation of society.

90 SOCIALISM

*

As regards the more practical experiments in
land nationalisation, which have been partially
carried on in some parts of Australia, and which are
threatened with a wholesale transformation into
freehold properties, one can only regret the change.
The complete success of the leasehold system, how-
ever, in reclaiming lands that were fit only for sheep
before, and in creating the most peaceful and
prosperous homes that the world knows, puts an
end for ever to the plea that so long as the State
retains the land and only lets it on lease, so long
will cultivation be perfunctory.

Indeed, these Australian experiments have de-
monstrated the success of land nationalisation, and
though it may appear to be paradoxical, the present
movement for enfranchisement only emphasises that
success. The Australasian States less than twenty
years ago were beginning to show all the symptoms
of the disease of poverty that had stricken the older
Western lands, and though the population did little
more than fringe part of the coasts, and but an
insignificant proportion of the acreage of the con-
tinent had been put to use, the pressure of land
monopoly was beginning to be felt. The State
boldly stopped it. Where it created peasant pro-
prietors the lands were sold again and the total
effect of the experiment was to multiply landlords
without removing the evil of land monopoly, and

SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 91

to put public money into private pockets. The
success of land nationalisation and security of tenure
(vitiated by the temptations left open to the tenant
to agitate to become owner) was, however, estab-
lished, and I predict with much confidence, that
Australasian Land Legislation in the future will
put this system upon a permanent basis.

Our own experiments in municipalisation,
establishing common ownership along with in-
dividual use, and our codes of factory, sanitary,
and public order laws, are of the same character as
the Australasian land experiments. They are based
upon the experience that the individual living in a
community finds liberty by pursuing the path of
social individualism, and that in organised society
individual liberty must have a basis of economic
independence. The state of society which does not
put human qualities before everything else that
ranks as value, limits and contorts individual liberty.
Social laws imposing upon the people of a State
their social obligations, amplify rather than limit
individual liberty, because individual liberty is
quahtative and not quantitative ; and those exten-
sions of State activity which proceed upon the
assumption that the citizens co-operatively should
supply their common needs only secure for the
individual that economic basis in possession which is
necessary if individual liberty is to be real. As the

92 SOCIALISM

result of a century of labour legislation and a
generation of municipalisation, individual liberty is
very much greater than it was previously. The
nearer we approach to the Socialist State the more
opportunities we shall have for the exercise of
individuality. This is indeed nothing more than
the application of the theory of mutual aid as a
means of progress, to the science of individualism.
Man's nature flourishes in an atmosphere of co-
operation much better than in one of competition.

If, however, we insist upon projecting ourselves
to the full Socialist State, and demand to know how,
in every detail, the individual will is to be adjusted
to common well-being — how, for instance, bottle-
washers are to be appointed — surely it is sufficient
to answer that the State will never be faced with
these problems at any given time. These relation-
ships will grow. Society is not to be changed as
we change the structure of a house ; it evolves as a
living thing does, changing with its organs and its
functions, the new forms never getting out of touch
with the old.

Socialism will, however, secure certain conditions
essential to freedom which the wage-earner does not
now enjoy. Art will then enter much more into
work than it now does, and the mechanical drudgery
of production will be reduced to a minimum.
Leisure will nurture individuality, and individuality

SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 93

abhors machine-made surroundings and household
gods made by the thousand. The higher spiritual
life of freedom can be lived only when human
energy and initiative are not absorbed in the pro-
duction of physical things. The object of all life is
more life, and here Socialism offers its help to the
middle-class revolt of to-day against the barrenness
of its possessions, its status, its duties. This
demand for more real freedom is the reason why the
Socialist ranks are being recruited so largely from
the middle and wealthy intellectual classes.

Thus, it seems to me, that only under Socialism
will natural inequality be no burden to men.
Socialism proposes to establish no state of equality.
It only proposes to adapt each organ to its natural
function — to give to each man a chance of doing
congenial work in the complex social life.

Again, social property in the instruments which
must be used in the production of wealth will render
unnecessary a great part of our coercive legislation.
Factory laws will not be exactions imposed upon
poor worried capitalists ; they will be merely work-
shop rules voluntarily made. Socialists, as such,
have no love for legislative control. It is necessary
to correct abuse of power now ; but they look forward
to a time when what is now^ done by law will be just
as natural a mode of life as are the breakfasting
habits of our people.

94 SOCIALISM

Socialism and the Family

The idea that Socialism is opposed to the family
organisation is equally absurd.

The origin and constitution of the family has
been the subject of much investigation, and its
secular beginning has been placed beyond dispute.
It grew up with other institutions in the course of
time. It depended at first on the climate, on
whether fires required to be tended, — woman being
the custodian of the hearth whilst men went fishing
and hunting, — on food supply, on the habits of the
people, on whether they were nomadic or settled,
hunters or agriculturists — very little on their
beliefs until ancestor worship arose, — and it was
placed on the firm foundation of monogamy only
when the accumulation of property led to a system
of inheritance.

There, in the barest and most disappointing way,
lies exposed the origin of that little community
round which so much sacred sentiment has grown.

Now, when the field of sociology was being
surveyed by the eager pioneers of Socialism with a
view to discovering the impediments they had to
overcome and the departures that had been made
from reason, the family naturally attracted their
attention. There had always been men, from Plato
downwards, who viewed with some impatience and

SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 95

jealousy the amount of attention and affection which
the family drew to itself like a greedy devourer, and
when they designed their ideal cities they gave men
a wider companionship and communal unit than the
home. This, however, was a characteristic of old
Utopian Socialism before the historical sense was
brought to bear upon institutions. The investiga-
tions into family origins were not the work of the
Socialists but of the Scientists.

But these theories about the family no more
became part of the Socialist theory than did a belief
in the Mark system — which Engels used as the
foundation of much of his Socialist criticism.^

No where and at no time was the abolition or
even the weakening of the family incorporated in
the Socialist creed. Indeed, much of the Socialist
criticism has been directed against the debased form
of the family — the loveless marriages, the cash
instead of the affectionate bonds, the sale of daughters
which is so prevalent in capitalist and aristocratic
society. Until women are free, we cannot know
what a real marriage is. The Socialist has used an
ideal conception of a family as a stick with which to
beat the bourgeoisie — the bourgeoisie which regards
the enslavement of women as essential to marriage,
and empty feminine heads and vulgarly decorated
and compressed feminine bodies as necessary to

^ Cf. F. Engels' Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.

96 SOCIALISM

family felicity. In doing so, the Socialist may have
laid himself open to misconception ; and those who
were ruining the family life, by demanding child
labour and the labour of young mothers, were able
to warn society against the evil designs of those who
were striving to put an end to their destructive
policy.

The real fact is that capitalism has been the
enemy of the family. The employment of child
labour before Factory legislation, the forcing of
women into factories, the reduction of men's wages
until they had to be supplemented by the earnings
of other members of the family, the increasing
difficulties that poor people experience in bringing
up a family, the selfish indulgence in pleasure which
is the result of idle classes living in luxury, the
immoralities which follow in the train of a wealthy
plutocracy, overcrowding in towns, high rents, — in
short, a whole complicated series of results of
capitalism in its economic and moral aspects has
been undermining the family and exposing it to
destruction. No state of society has been more
prodigal in its disregard of the family than that in
which we are now.^

^ Marx has been blamed as an advocate of this destruction, and
extracts from his writings, wickedly torn from their contexts, have
been published to prove it. This is an example : " The bourgeois
family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement
vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital," A

SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 97

To-day one of the first cares of Socialism is to
protect what remains of the family and rebuild what
has fallen down. In the first place, it is evident that
the family cannot last except upon a firm economic
basis and under healthy and moral circumstances.
The economic independence of women would go far
to secure their proper treatment after marriage ; a
substantial increase in the price of their labour would
enable women to retain self-respect and release the
mother from the weary double toil of factory and
home ; an appreciation, such as the Socialist has, of
the importance of the function of motherhood would
place the married woman in a position of proud
independence and would not doom her, as she is now
doomed, to a slavish dependence ; whilst a more ample
co-operation between the State, as a health authority,
and the home, would increase standards of physical
efficiency and with them standards of moral purity.

most terrifying sentence until it is read with its context. The
sentence before it is : " On what foundation is the present bourgeois
family based? On capital, on jprivate gain. In its completely
developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But
this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence
of the family among the proletarians and in public prostitution."
Here, then, we have a charge brought against Marx and, through
him, against Socialism by an extract which, with its context, is part
of an argument that only under Socialism will family life become real,
and that under the present state of things, to quote a later passage in
the Communist Manifesto from which these sentences are taken, " Our
bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of the
proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes,
take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives."

7

98 SOCIALISM

Moreover, the State, in its own interests, will do
everything it can to develop individuality in its
children. The barrack school and State nursery —
never much more than the Utopian dreams of
amiable people — are condemned by up-to-date
psychologists. The personal touch and affection of
the mother, the surroundings and ethics of a small
community, the sense of continuity which comes to
the maturing child's mind from a personal organisa-
tion like the family, are all invaluable to a State
which must take as much care of its citizens of
to-morrow as it does of its citizens of to-day.
Further, the settling influences of family responsi-
bilities on adults, particularly the care and interest
it gives them in training the next generation —
because a time comes when the parents, becoming
aware that their days are running down fast, find
sweet consolation in fulfilling themselves through
their children — must ever be valued by a State
which guards its own stability and seeks to preserve
a continuity in its evolution. The family is in-
separable from a complete Socialist organisation. So
much so is this the case that I can imagine a time
when, the marriage choice being absolutely one of
free-will and the stability of family life having
proved itself to be essential to the stability of State
life, the Socialist State will decline to recognise
divorce altogether as being too subversive to its policy.

SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 99

Socialism and Religion

From what is said about Socialism and the
family one naturally turns to what is said about
Socialism and religion.

The occasional association of Socialist and anti-
Christian propaganda is due to several causes, one
of the most potent of which is, that minorities tend
to herd together, although, were they majorities,
they would find they had nothing in common.
Moreover, the Socialist, full of the reforming zeal
of his creed, finds in the ethics of the Gospels a
marvellous support for his economic and political
proposals, but in the churches and in the conduct
of the majority of Christians, he only discovers a
worldly wisdom which seems to him to be the
negation of the spirit of Christ. Much of what is
regarded as anti-Christian Socialist doctrine is,
therefore, only an attack upon the churches and
professed Christians, and, so far from being anti-
Christian, is, as a matter of fact, inspired by the
ethics of Christ's teaching.

But, undoubtedly, some leading Socialists have
gone farther than that, and have taken the view
that religion is but one of the weapons in the hands
of the rich for keeping the poor quiet. This was
particularly the case with the earlier leaders, and,
to vmderstand why that was so, we must remember

100 SOCIALISM

the conditions of their times. Their description of
the functions of the Church — and to the Church
they went for an interpretation of religion — was
literally true. Money was voted by Parliament to
build churches so as to control the propaganda of
Radicals and Chartists; texts and quotations from
the Prayer-Book were used to show that God
created the poor and meant them to remain so ;
the parson was the friend of the Squire and stood
for the bad existing order ; the political history of
the Episcopacy in modern times is a record of their
blind opposition to the popular will.^

This experience of the ardent reformers who
found religion in alliance with the world, the flesh,
and the devil, coincided with a time when historical
research was setting supernatural explanations of
natural facts on one side, and when idealistic
philosophy was being overshadowed by the scientific
turn which Darwin's work was giving to pure
thought. The mind of man, liberated from a
wearying and cramping imprisonment, was bound
to receive the enthusiastic homage of those who
by force of reason were laying the foundations of
new social states, and were attacking with youthful
boldness the venerated but the apparently crumbling
foundations of the old. But, if we are to attribute

1 It will be remembered that Lord Melbourne cynically said that
the Church in his time was the last bulwark against Christianity.

I

SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 101

to movements all the opinions of their pioneers, the
Tory Party must be held to be little better than
a crowd of Deists and Atheists, because, at its
origin, we find that its most distinguished sup-
porters were men of timorous culture, like Hume,
who knew too much to believe in miracles and
thought themselves too wise to hold God in much
fear or respect ; while the Liberal Party can be
nothing but a hotbed of sceptics.

These considerations are futile. Socialism has
no more to do with a man's religion than it has
with the colour of his hair. Socialism deals with
secular things, not with ultimate beliefs. There
are Christian Socialists, and there are secularist
Socialists, just as there are Christian electors and
secularist electors ; there are Christian organisations
which exist to prove that all Christians ought to
be Socialists because the Socialist State is the only
political form through which the ethics of the
Sermon on the Mount can find expression ; and
there are and have been secularist leaders like
Mr. Bradlaugh and Mr. Herbert Spencer who have
preached the incompatibility of Secularism and
Socialism. As a political and economic theory.
Socialism has just as much and no more to do
with religion as any other theory of the relationship
between the State and the individual ; whilst, as a
moral theory, it is neither religious nor anti-religious.

102 SOCIALISM

He who bases his morals upon rational sanctions will
explain the ethics of Socialism as a rationalist ; he
who bases his morals upon revelation and religion will
explain the same ethics of Socialism as a Christian.

If we examine the personnel of the Socialist
movement, we can see how absurd is the statement
that Socialism and Secularism are one and the
same. The majority of the local leaders of Socialism
have approached it led by a religious conscience.
Nonconformity has trained our speakers in its
pulpits and has fashioned our devoted workers in
its Sunday schools. The Church has shed not a
little of the light of its countenance upon us.
Above all, that remarkable Sunday Morning Move-
ment— known as Adult Schools — which brings
thousands of men out early every Sunday to
worship and discuss the practical aspects of their
Christian faith, has added a fine seriousness and
sturdy stability to the rank and file of our organisa-
tions where the two movements exist together.

At any rate, there must be some meaning in the
fact that at every great revival of Christian emotion,
communist doctrines have been preached. They
have sometimes been wrapped up in hideous ex-
travagance, but the extravagances can always be
separated from the sober motives. Christianity at
its best has always appeared in the world with
Communism at its right hand.

SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 103

In short, there is nothing in the Socialist theory,
nothing in the Socialist method, antagonistic to
religion.

Socialism and Property

One more objection may be discussed. One
view of Socialism is that it is a scheme of con-
fiscation of property from one class to give it to
another class — that Socialists are Dick Turpins
made respectable by using Acts of Parliament
instead of pistols.

Now the real fact is, that the Socialist has come
to put an end to Dick Turpin methods. Socialism
is a rational criticism of our present methods of
production and distribution. It desires to say to
the possessors : Show us by what title you possess ;
and it proposes to pass its judgments upon the
axiom that whoever renders service to society
should be able to have some appropriate share
in the national wealth. So far from abolishing
property, it desires to establish it upon the only
basis which makes property secure, that of service —
of creative service. It denies that all forms of
private property are now expedient, because it
denies that any individual or class of individuals
can be possessed of rights which make it impossible
for other individuals or classes of individuals to be
other than propertyless. Property in men was once

104 SOCIALISM

regarded as something which only anarchists like
Lloyd Garrison, or madmen like John Brown of
Harper's Ferry, could have the impertinence to
challenge.

Our experience of the capitalist epoch has
influenced our ideas of property just as through the
feudal epoch new ideas of property arose which
corresponded to the commercial epoch which was then
beginning ; and the most definite change in our
ideas of property which has been occasioned by our
experience of the past century has been that the
community as a whole creates values and is a pro-
ducing agent, and, therefore, that it has a title to
own property to be put to its own uses. We have
experienced that landlords in Parliaments elected by
themselves have stolen public rights and other kinds
of property, and that, as local magnates of authority,
they have gone farther in that direction than even
their own Acts of Parliament sanctioned. We have
experienced that they have used their property
rights in order to exact heavy tolls upon labour —
town land rents, mining royalties, and so on — ^just
like mediaeval Rhine barons. We have experienced
that railways, run for private profit, have not served
national commerce as they ought. In scores of
other ways, from parcel carriage to milk supply, from
the upkeep of roads to the building of warships,
from education to the making of sewers, from

SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 105

popular concerts to small farms, we have experienced
that our ideas of private property need supplement-
ing by ideas of communal property.

We, therefore, in this respect, turn the tables
upon our critics and reply that it is they who
practise and defend the Dick Turpin method of the
armed man appropriating values which do not
belong to him. It is we who desire to place property
on a sound foundation ; it is they who ask us to
respect spoliation. The distribution of wealth
to-day is determined largely because we recognise
private property in things like land — Dick Turpin's
pistol — which is profitable only because it enables
its owners to despoil defenceless creators of wealth.

Socialists do not object to property ; they are
not opposed to private property. They are, there-
fore, not opposed to inheritance. The right to
acquire and hold involves the right to dispose by
will or by gift. We only object to such a use of
property as enables classes for generation after
generation to live on the proceeds of other people's
labour without doing any useful service to society.
Those forms of property in the use or abuse of which
the community is more interested than any private
individual, should be controlled by the community
in order that the right of private property may
become real to millions of workers. The authors of
the Communist Manifesto jeered at the objection

106 SOCIALISM

taken to them on the ground that they desired to
abolish private property, in these words : " You
reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away
with a form of property, the necessary condition for
whose existence is, the non-existence of any property
for the immense majority of society."

I may appropriately refer here to the considera-
tion that during the transition to Socialism much
hardship will be entailed by loss of property taken
by the State. During that stage, however, there
will be no confiscation. There has been no con-
fiscation caused by the municipalisation of tramways,
and though care will be taken not to repeat the
financial blunders which took place when the
telegraphs were acquired, there need be no fear that
the other extreme will be adopted. Public opinion
would never tolerate such a thing ; but, quite apart
from that, the community could not stand any such
serious shock to its life as those contemplate who
accuse us of planning great acts of confiscation.

That there will be hardships I am not concerned
to deny. The classes who live upon other people's
labour, and consequently keep other people poor
in order that they may be rich, will experience the
effects of the change to a more healthy state of
affairs. But these classes will not suffer any more
than they do now. They are the chief victims of
Stock Exchange swindles, of commercial crises, of

SOME OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM 107

the sinking of inflated values to their natural levels.
It is upon them that every commercial and financial
harpy preys. Twenty years of the ordinary
operations of speculative finance and competitive
industry cause more sufiering to innocent old ladies
living on investments and trustful orphans depend-
ing upon trustees, than would have to be endured
during half a century spanning the gulf between the
present state of things and Socialism. Moreover, as
that gulf was being crossed and the intricate read-
justment of society being made, the humane and
protective activities of the State would be developed
and the injured ones would fall upon the lap of a
benevolent society and not upon the gutter, as is the
case now. Finally, the suff"ering — such as it may be
— would be the last which society would impose, and
would not be, as at present, only one episode in a series
of painful catastrophes which fall upon innocent
people with periodic regularity.

CHAPTER V

THE POLITICAL FUTURE OF SOCIALISM

One is often met with the inquiry : How is Socialism
going to be brought about ? and on such occasions
one is expected to produce the architectural features
of the Socialist State and defend them to the most
minute particular against attacks of '' the practical
man " who " knows that human nature will not
budge an inch from where it now stands." It is as
well to remember that the evolution of human
conduct and motive is still in process and has not
come to an end, and that what satisfies people as
aims in life or rewards for effort can be greatly
modified by social circumstances and education.
We dogmatise about what human beings will or
will not do, and about nothing are we less well
equipped for dogmatising. Moreover, the question
really does not arise in our Socialist problem at all,
because under democratic government we can never
have more Socialism at any given time than human
nature will stand, and that settles the question.

108

POLITICAL FUTURE 109

If, however, we may properly decline to go into
a barren discussion as to whether we must change
human character before we have Socialism, we must
not decline to lay down the general lines of the
Socialist programme because that is the path, up to
the limit of our present horizon, leading to the
Socialism beyond.

Industrial Reconstruction

The Socialist objective is a State wherein labour
will meet with an adequate reward and human life
be valued above property. To-day, property rules
life and life is bent and twisted so as to fit into
the contorted ethics and other imperatives of this
property-worshipping age. The Socialist believes
that so long as private property in things essential
to human well-being is recognised, so long will
property dominate life. An essential feature of
the Socialist State will, therefore, be the common
ownership of all those forms of property in the use
or abuse of which the whole community is more
interested than private individuals, and the employ-
ment of such property for common ends and not
for private profit. Where the line is to be drawn
between common interest and individual interest
cannot be determined by theoretical considerations
of the rights of the State or of the individual, but
by practical experiences of the working of Socialistic

no SOCIALISM

experiments from time to time. The Socialist,
however much he may be inspired by a priori
reasoning, must always be guided by practical
results. The Socialist method is a combination of
theory and practice : it is the scientific experimental
method.

With these considerations in mind, the principles
and major items of the Socialist programme easily
can be deduced.

The first task of the Socialist living in these
transition times is to make the public familiar with
the distinction, on the one hand, between property
which enables the holders to exploit the labour of
other people — property which means the impoverish-
ment of society — and, on the other hand, property
which an individual must possess in order to enable
him to live and develop his individuality. Between
the two extreme limits of such a classification of
property, there is a graded scale with a middle zone
where classification is impossible. But the extremes
are perfectly clear. On the one side, there is land,
the value of which is to the greatest degree de-
pendent upon the community ; on the other side,
there is food, clothing, a living income. The
Socialist policy regarding the first is State owner-
ship ; regarding the second it is private ownership.

Experience has shown us that the private
ownership of land has led to depopulation, to the

POLITICAL FUTURE 111

waste of national resources, to the diversion of
national wealth from public to private uses ; and
the same experience has proved that an essential to
a constructive national policy of race building and
the organisation of national wealth is the national
control of its land. However complete may have
been the justification for private ownership of land
at a time when an impetus was required for cultiva-
tion, that justification rested upon a temporary
condition, and has long ceased to exist. " The
common and general utility of the exercise of the
right of property," said Saint-Simon, " can vary
with the times." '' Landed property in England,"
said John Stuart Mill, " is thus very far from
completely fulfilling the conditions which render its
existence economically justifiable."

There can be little improvement in the use to
which we put our land and little reconstructive work
done in dealing with the overcrowding of towns so long
as private ownership of land exists. Electric trac-
tion overcomes to a certain extent the tendency of
landlordism to herd population together in towns.
But every dispersive force can operate only if it
makes it worth the while of the landowners to allow
it to operate. By the expenditure of public money,
great tracts of land adjoining our industrial centres
have been brought within the limits of building
areas, and suburbs have grown to increase enormously

112 SOCIALISM

the rent-rolls of landlords who have never lifted a
little finger to benefit the communities which are
presenting them with such substantial increases to
their incomes.

Even in new countries like Australia and New
Zealand, the curse of landlordism has already made
itself felt, and the first thing which the national
reformer had to do was to shatter its power.

It is, therefore, perfectly clear that public utility
is no longer served but sacrificed by the private
ownership of land.

Monopolies work out in the same way. In its
simplest form, a monopoly consists in a service
which by its nature cannot be given by competing
undertakings. Rival gas or electricity or water or
tram companies cannot supply towns. Electricity
may compete with gas, 'buses or underground tubes
may compete with trains, but the competition is
in reality between two nionopolies in lighting or
travelling facilities, each being a monopoly in itself,
and each representing a diff'erent form of convenience,
and tending to reduce the competition of other forms
to vanishing point. Hansoms no longer compete
with four-wheeled cabs, and motor cabs will, by and
by, supplant hansoms except for some special services.

The Socialist programme regarding these forms
of property is that the community should own them.
The nationalisation of land, the nationalisation of

POLITICAL FUTURE 113

railways ; the municipalisation of the civic services
like gas, water, electricity, trams — that is the first
instalment of the programme which is to give effect
to the Socialist doctrine that public property is as
necessary in a modern State as private property.

Socialism and State Income

Akin to our programme of property-holding are
our proposals regarding taxation. The theory of
taxation held by the individualist Liberal school has
remained as Adam Smith defined it. His " canons "
assume that taxes are deductions from private
incomes taken by the State because the State has
power to take them. " Taxes," says Ricardo, " are a
portion of the produce of the country placed at the
disposal of the Government." John Stuart Mill
refers to a just system of taxation as one which
apportions " the contribution of each person towards
the expenses of government, so that he shall feel
neither more nor less inconvenience from his share
of the payment than every other person experiences
from his." Thus, the assumption that underlies the
"classical" discussions on taxation is that it is a
sacrifice of individual property to Government needs.
And the greatest of all the statesmen who translated
into political creeds the theories of the individualist
economists — Mr. Gladstone — rarely touches taxation
without reminding the country that the income of

114 SOCIALISM

the State must necessarily be derived from the
income of citizens, and probably no doctrine of a
past generation has been less effectually challenged
than this, by a new generation thinking out its
problems for itself. To-day its errors and failings
are available for political use by any of those middle-
class reactionary sections whose notion of the State
is that it should do as little as possible beyond
providing policemen to protect their property and a
navy to guard their trading ships, and who are trying
to get the working classes to pay more of the heavy
debts of past national escapades than they now do.

The principle that each should contribute to the
State revenues according to his ability is of secondary
importance to the Socialist, to whom the fundamental
principle of the levying of State income is that the
State should secure for its own use the values that
are created by the existence and activity of the
State.

It is quite possible to classify incomes so that
those gained solely by individual energy may be
placed on one side, and those obtained by exploiting
the community may be placed on the other. Incomes
display a gradation of merit, not all merit on one
side and all demerit on the other. In a sense, nearly
all incomes made in settled society depend upon
the existence of the State. But there are extremes
which very properly can be classified into those

POLITICAL FUTURE 115

which the individual has earned and those which
the community has created. Most of the rent for
land, practically the whole of urban rents, are com-
munal in their origin. Most of the dividends paid
by undertakings like railways and municipal services,
and particularly by most undertakings, the nominal
capital of which is in excess of the capital actually
absorbed in starting and developing them, should
be similarly regarded. To say, for instance, that
the private enterprise of railway shareholders and
directors made our railways flourish, is a proposition
which no one can defend seriously for a moment.

The Socialist programme, therefore, includes a
method of obtaining a State revenue adequate to
State requirements, by securing for the State an
income from its own property. A rough classifica-
tion of income according to its source, the imposition
of an income - tax increasing in heaviness as the
source approximates in character to rents from urban
land, and all but disappearing when incomes are,
for all practical purposes, solely the result of in-
dividual eifort, is the Socialist programme of
taxation.

This proposal must not be mixed up with that
for a graduated income-tax, because it is totally
different. The graduated income-tax depends upon
the theory that each should pay according to his
ability — a theory which has none of the constructive

116 SOCIALISM

value of that which provides that the State
should enjoy the reward of its own efforts and
be possessed of property so as to express its own
personality.^

If the income from public property and State
effort be not enough for State purposes, we must
then devise the best means for levying supple-
mentary contributions from individuals. A gradu-
ated income - tax ought then to be applied — or,
better still, graduated death duties.

These are the main roads by which Socialism
is to be approached, because when they have been
fully traversed, property will be held in such a way
that the wealth produced by labour and by all useful
service will fructify throughout society, and the
State will have an income sufficiently large to enable
it to carry out the communal will and so make the
community an efficient co-operator with the in-
dividual in establishing liberty. Nationalisation of
monopolies and a system of taxation such as I
outline may appear to be devoid of all the heroic
remedies which one associates with Socialism, but
nevertheless a political policy devised under the
guidance of these aims would fundamentally alter
economic relations within the State, and when

^ It is sometimes argued, however, that a graduated income-tax
means in reality a specially heavy tax upon unearned incomes.
That may be so in practice, but the two principles of taxation which
I discuss are quite distinct.

POLITICAL FUTURE 117

its full consequences would be reaped, Socialism
would have come upon us.

Socialism and Reform

But society not being a mechanical relationship
merely, but being united by habits, laws, customs,
and interdependence of interests, the Socialist change
must be gradual and must proceed in stages, just
as the evolution of an organism does. Society will
resist a too violent readjustment. Kings can be
removed and a republic established by revolutions,
but in establishing Socialism we change organic
relationships, not superficial forms of government.
Socialism, therefore, calls for the highest qualities of
statesmanship, for that rare faculty of knowing how
much change can be assimilated at any given time,
how drastically one can readjust without producing
reaction. Also the Parliamentary work of Socialism
must be supplemented by educational propaganda,
the chief aim of which is to induce the intellectual
portions of the community to adopt new modes of
sociological thought. The present organisation of
society will be impossible, not when it has actually
crumbled beneath the weight of its bankruptcy,
but when its absurdity, its injustice, its waste are
clearly shown up against another system of organ-
isation which has been proved to be rational and
moral both in idea and experience.

118 SOCIALISM

As we approach the Socialist State by the
changes in property-holding and in finance which I
have indicated, certain things will happen. The
weight of economic and social parasitism now
preying upon the industrial State will be lightened,
prices of commodities will fall, the volume of
exchange will swell, and the average standard of
life will be materially improved. The industrial
efficiency of the country will be vastly increased.

But the saving which will arise from the destruc-
tion of parasitism and Dick Turpinism must be
fairly distributed. Some of it will, of course, go to
cheapen commodities, and this will at once improve
the standard of living at home and increase our
efficiency as competitors on foreign markets. But
that will not absorb the whole advantage. Both a
reduction in working hours and an increase in wages
will be possible. Sweating will disappear. Women's
cheaply paid labour will no longer compete with
men's. Industry will be steadied and unemployment
as we now know it will cease. The road to the
Socialist State will be opened up.

In the meanwhile, a vast network of evils and evil
tendencies has to be unravelled. We do not build
on vacant ground. We have inherited the failures
of the past — the slum, the sweating den, the starved
child, the drunkard, the neglectful parent, the
ignorant and dehumanised citizen, the pauper young

POLITICAL FUTURE 119

and old, the unemployable, the unemployed. In
dealing with these problems which press us with such
troublesome insistence and which crowd so closely
upon us as to shut out the way ahead, lies our
greatest danger. It is so easy to agitate for a pallia-
tive, to stump for things which do nothing but harm,
and to gain a reputation for human sympathy by flit-
ting from agitation to agitation without troubling
to think systematically of the future. Wandering
aimlessly in the wilderness is a delightful pastime,
and leading a crowd from oasis to oasis gives a man,
for the time being, the reputation of being a great
leader. If the advance to Socialism is to be retarded
as this country grows older, it will be because at the
beginning the Socialists made themselves responsible
for legislation which was merely palliative, which
touched the surface only, and which became assimil-
ated by the old order and gave it a new lease of life —
for instance, tinkering with the rates of nominal
wages, or playing with fanciful democratic toys like
the Referendum. It is perfectly certain that every-
thing which is not in some way a carrying out of the
principles of Socialism will have to be undone — or
those principles are false. The idea that a lax
administration of the Poor Law is Socialistic, that
putting an unemployed man on a farm for six weeks
at the public expense is Socialistic, that feeding
school children is the beginning of the Socialistic

120 SOCIALISM

State, is absurd. We can deal with our unemployed,
our sweated workers, our derelicts, only by attacking
the causes of unemployment, of sweating, of human
deterioration, and though, at a crisis, our humani-
tarianism will compel us to resort to palliatives and
give temporary relief, our action at such times should
not be a willing and proud thing, but one which is
hesitating and temporary.

Socialism has also a great part to play immedi-
ately in international politics. It alone can banish
national jealousies from the Foreign Offices ; it alone
offers the guarantees of peace which are a necessary
preliminary to disarmament. And in addition to that
it is formulating a policy defining the relationships
between the white and the yellow races, between
the civilised and the backward, which offers some
promise of averting what would otherwise be the
almost inevitable conflict between East and West,
and also of preserving the existence of races that
seem otherwise to be doomed to disappear from the
face of the earth. Socialism has a world policy as
well as a national one — a corollary to its belief in
the brotherhood of man.

Socialism in Politics

A final word regarding the political relations
of Socialism is necessary. Where Parliamentary
Government — as in Germany — is only a name, a

POLITICAL FUTURE 121

Socialist Party can exist separately and distinct from
other parties ; and as under this form of government
politics are more theoretical than under a democracy,
the existence of such a Party is still easier.^

Under a democratic Parliamentary Government,
however, it is practically impossible to maintain a
pure and simple Socialist Party — although Govern-
ment by Parliamentary groups makes this easier.
Even then, as we see in France and Australia, the
Socialist Party will have on occasions to co-operate
in a bloc either refusing or accepting the responsi-
bility of office.^

In Great Britain at present, political parties are
in confusion, but the lines of division between two
great parties are emerging. The mass of the people
are prepared to accept the new doctrines not as
absolute ideas, as the fully-fledged Socialists do, but
as guiding principles in experimental legislation. That
is what the rise of the Labour Party means — that is
all that it ever need mean, because that is how
society develops from stage to stage of its existence.

1 It must be pointed out, however, that even under the political
conditions of Germany the rise to power of a Trade Union organisa-
tion is compelling the Socialist movement to modify its old position
and approximate to that of the British movement, e.g.^ the Labour
Party.

2 At the International Socialist Congress at Amsterdam in 1904,
it was emphatically laid down and accepted by all the Socialist
leaders, that in times of national crisis this should be done. No
attempt was made, however, to define a national crisis.

122 SOCIALISM

The Manchester school was never more than a tiny
nucleus in the political life of the nineteenth century,
but it supplied progressive ideas to that century and
consequently led it. Nineteenth - century politics
without Manchesterism would be a body without
a brain. So in the twentieth century, Socialism, which
will be infinitely more powerful than Manchesterism
was in the nineteenth, will probably fulfil itself by
being the creative centre of a much more powerful
political movement. This is the position of the
Labour Party at present.

The voting strength of this movement will come
from the ranks of labour — the organised intelligent
workers — the men who have had municipal and
Trade Union experience — the men of self-respect who
know the capacity of the people. These men will
feel the oppression of the present time, its injustice,
its heartlessness. They know their own leaders and
have confidence in them. Their concern is that of
the man who gives service and who sees his reward
disappear like water through a sieve. They are to
be the constructive ao;ents of the next stage in our
industrial evolution. But they are not to stand
alone. Socialism is no class movement. Socialism
is a movement of opinion, not an organisation of
status. It is not the rule of the working class ; it
is the organisation of the community. Therefore,
to my mind, one of the most significant facts of the

POLITICAL FUTURE 123

times is the conversion of the intellectual middle
class to Socialism. Those who think that the middle
class is to organise against Socialism are to discover
that they are profoundly mistaken. To put it on
the lowest ground, only part of the interests of the
middle class is opposed to Socialism, and against
that must be placed the intellectual attractiveness
of the Socialist theory. In determining political
effort an active intelligence and an awakened
idealism are always more powerful than personal
interests. To quote the Communist Manifesto once
more : *' Just as, therefore, at an earlier period,
a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie,
so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to
the proletariat, and in particular a portion of the
bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves
to the level of comprehending theoretically the
historical movement as a whole."

In the ninth book of The Republic Plato dis-
cusses the wise man as citizen. *' He will look at
the city which is within him, and take heed that no
disorder will occur in it such as might arise from
superfluity or want ; and upon this principle he will
regulate his property and gain and sjDend according
to his means." " Then, if that is his motive,"
remarks Glaucon, " he will not be a statesman."
"By the dog of Egypt, he will," ejaculated
Socrates."

124 SOCIALISM

So long as Plato's reading of the human heart
remains true, men will take up their abode in the
city " which exists in idea," and rich and poor alike
will labour for the establishment of the State where
life alone will be valued as treasure, and the tyranny
of the economic machine will no longer hold spiritual
things in subjection. That State I call Socialism.

APPENDIX

The progress of Socialism can best be seen in the
results of the electoral contests which have taken
place in the leading industrial nations of the world,
and the following tables show this at a glance : —

1867
1878
1887
1890
1893
1896
1903
1907

1887
1889
1893
1898
1902
1906

1894
1900
1902
1904
1906

GERMANY
30,000 votes, 8 Members of Parliament.

437,158
763,123
1,427,298
1,876,738
2,107,076
3,010,472
3,258,968

9
11
35
44
57
81
43

FRANCE

47,000 votes, 19 Members of Parliament.
120,000 „ 9
440,000
790,000
805,000

896,000

49
50
48
52

BELGIUM

320,000 votes, 32 Members of Parliament.

344,000 „ 33

467,000 „ 34

463,967 „ 28

469,094 „ 30

125

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5)

5>

>)

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126

APPENDIX

ITALY

1892

26,000

votes,

6 Members of

Parliament

1895

76,000

))

10

)>

5>

1897

135,000

J)

16

jj

))

1900

175,000

?)

32

»

)J

1904

320,000

55

28

J)

))

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

1897 . 750,000 votes, - Members of Parliament.
1901 . 780,000 „ 10 „ „

1907 . 1,041,948 „ 87

THE UNITED STATES

The votes polled by Socialist candidates are im-
possible to get with any accuracy, but the following
figures are published by the International Socialist
Bureau : —

1888

2,068 votes.

1897

55,550 votes

1892

. 21,512 „

1898

82,204 „

1894

30,120 „

1900

98,424 „

1895

. 34,869 „

1902

223,903 „

1896

. 36,275 „

1904

500,000 „

GREAT BRITAIN

1895

46,000

votes,

0 Members of Parliament.

19001 .

65,000

»

2

>»

))

19061 .

335,000

5>

30

)>

>>

1 This is the vote of the Labour Party candidates, not all of whom
were Socialists.

APPENDIX

127

The International Socialist Bureau estimates the
total Socialist vote of the world as follows : —

1867
1877
1887
1897
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904

30,000 votes.

494,304

931,454
3,896,602
4,874,740
4,912,740
5,253,054
6,285,374
6,686,000

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